Notes on OS/2 Disk Usage I



By: Walter Metcalf

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Large Disks

  1. In this section, unless otherwise specified, a large drive is one that contains more than 1024 cylinders (512 MB). If you've been shopping for a new hard drive recently, then you know that virtually all drives available today are "large" by this definition. However it is important to keep this issue always in your mind because you could easily encounter older, perfectly good drives that are not "large", especially on notebooks.

  2. If you are servicing a computer, it is especially important to be aware of this issue when moving or replacing disk drives. Be sure the CMOS settings for EIDE drives (or host adapter settings for SCSI drives) match the kind of drive you are connecting to that adapter position. Here are some tips you can use to help you get it right:

    1. If the disk drive you are installing contains more than 1024 cylinders, then the CMOS "MODE" setting must be "LBA".

    2. Most reputable manufacturers put the geometry (the number of cylinders, heads, and sectors) on the label of their drives.

    3. If you are not absolutely sure what the MODE setting should be, then it is a good idea to use the IDE AUTO DETECTION feature contained in most CMOS', and then use the recommended value.

    4. Finally, you can set MODE to "Auto", and let the computer autodetect the correct value on boot up.

      It is critical to get the above settings correct, because failure to do so can easily result in the destruction of ALL the data on your drive!

  3. Be careful about out-of-date utilities.

    1. If you have updated OS/2 with the latest drivers (if you're are using less than Warp 4 Fixpak 6 or Warp 3 FP 35) or with a more recent fixpak, then you generally don't have to worry about programs running under control of OS/2, because all OS/2 programs use drivers that IBM has kept up-to-date. However, standalone utilities are a different story. A good example is the self-booting Power Boot. Because of its standalone nature, Power Boot does not use standard OS/2 drivers, and therefore we cannot tell a priori how older versions of Power Boot (or any similar utility) will handle large drives. If you are using or plan to use that type of utility on a large disk, you should test it first to make sure it behaves correctly.

    2. Older versions of Partition Magic (e.g. 3.0) present a slightly different problem. Although Partition Magic is not self-booting and runs under control of OS/2, it manipulates the partition table and hard drive directly. Unfortunately the algorithms used by these versions do not always work on large drives. The fix is the same as in the previous paragraph: upgrade to a newer version of the program. Partition Magic 5.x has been successfully used by many OS/2 users, contains several extra "goodies", and is a stable program. Unfortunately, this version is a DOS-Windows only program; however, HPFS partitions are fully supported.1

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    Notes

    1 See Partition Magic 5.0 / 5.01 & OS/2 for a review of this product.


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