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  1. #1
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    Replacement hard disk RAQ4

    Sorry if I’ve missed a how-to post on this, I try searching but failed to find the answer to my question:

    I've just replaced my old RAQ4 10GB HDD with an 80GB HDD and reinstalled the Cobalt OS from the restore CD.

    However, when I look at the system properties it only shows a total HDD size of about 13GB.

    How do I get the system to recognise the larger HDD please?

    Thanks

  2. #2
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    Raq4s often shipped with 20Gb disks, so your setup should work out of the box with any LBA24 disks up to 120Gb, excepting some 7200.9 disks known not to work. If it is an LBA48 disk, there are known problems with installation with these, but I can't imagine you'd have an LBA48 disk that was only 80Gb

    Some HDDs have jumper options that limit them to a small # of cylinders, and thus a subset of the available space. Make sure your disk has only the "Master" jumper set, and nothing else -- you don't need "Cable Select", and you don't want any "Cylinder Limit".

    In a pinch, pull the drive, stick it in a PC, run the manufacturer's standalone utilities on it to reformat it, and you should be good to go.

  3. #3
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    Thanks for that reply with some good advice.

    I can confirm that the HDD (an IBM deskstar) only has the master jumper set, and was originally formatted and running at its stated 80GB capacity – but this was in a windows system.

    All I did was take the drive from the windows PC and stick it into the RAQ4, then using a cross over cable, do the standard Cobalt OS install. Everything works fine, except the reported size of the disk under Cobalt is now only 13GB?

    Do I need to do some kind of Unix mount command to get the RAQ to recognise the full 80GB?

    Thanks

  4. #4
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    I seem to recall some very old original OSRCD's had this issue - don't use the restore CD that shipped with your RaQ, download a new ISO or purchase one from Gerald at RaQware.com

  5. #5
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    Thanks for that suggestion. I did come across that a while ago when I was doing something else.

    I did install the OS from a new OS disk that was fully patched and updated, I think I might have got it from Zeffie – but cannot be sure, so I don’t think it’s that.

    Any other ideas gratefully received?

    Is there a Unix command I can issue at the command line to see how big Unix thinks the HDD is, or maybe examine the partitions and any unused space? If this were a windows machine I would probably use something like Partition Magic. Is there a Unix equivalent?

    Thanks to everyone for their continued interest.

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by OBLtd
    I did install the OS from a new OS disk that was fully patched and updated, I think I might have got it from Zeffie – but cannot be sure, so I don’t think it’s that.
    Quote Originally Posted by Zeffie
    Most Likely if your using my restore cd you just need to update your bios.
    If you are going to restore, you're best off going to a more modern OS like CentOS+BlueQuartz or Rackstar, rather than the Raq4 OS, and upgrading straight to the most recent 2.10.3 ROM. Ask here if you need a pointer to instructions.

    Quote Originally Posted by OBLtd
    Is there a Unix command I can issue at the command line to see how big Unix thinks the HDD is, or maybe examine the partitions and any unused space? If this were a windows machine I would probably use something like Partition Magic. Is there a Unix equivalent?
    *cat /proc/ide/hda/capacity will tell you what the kernel thinks the capacity is. Other values in that directory may also be helpful.

    *smartctl will tell you lots of info about the disks, including their actual (hardware) size, and any relevant defects, etc.

    *If you are brave, utilities like sfdisk, parted will work, and if you're willing to pull the drive and put it in a system witha CD, lots of other things will work, including Paragon Partition Manager.

    Good luck!

  7. #7
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    Thanks for the advice on commands. I tired the cat command and this is what I got:

    > cat /proc/ide/hda/capacity
    160836480
    > cat /proc/ide/hda/geometry
    physical 159560/16/63
    logical 159560/16/63

    I'm not sure what that all means, I thought I'd install an 80GB drive or do those figure equal that?

    WRT the suggestion of installing a newer OS rather than the RAQ (with Zeffie updates), I was tempted to do this, but I also run another RAQ4 with the Cobalt OS and I try things out on my 'test' machine before running them on the live server. So I need to keep both the systems in parallel in terms of software/OS.

    That said I still might upgrade both machines, so if you could post a pointer to the most recent 2.10.3 ROM instructions I would be grateful.

    Thanks as always for all your help.

  8. #8
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    The capacity is in sectors. Sector size varies from disk to disk, you can look it up online for your disk or read it on the back of the disk (usually). You'll notice that "geometry" is tracks/heads/sectors-per-cyl, so if you multiply those three numbers you get the total number of cylinders in the capacity. I should have meniotned that hdparm(8) provides this info in slightly more readable format. BTW, /proc is documented in proc(5).

    So something here is a little whacky.

    My system has Maxtor 120Gb disks, and here is the hdparm report:

    Code:
    # /sbin/hdparm -i /dev/hda   # n.b. -I gives more info on modern systems
    
    /sbin/hdparm -i /dev/hda
    
    /dev/hda:
    
     Model=Maxtor 4G120J6, FwRev=GAK819K0, SerialNo=<snip>
     Config={ Fixed }
     RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=57
     BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
     CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=240121728
     IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
     PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
     DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
     UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 *udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 udma6
     AdvancedPM=yes: disabled (255) WriteCache=enabled
     Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 0:
    
    
    # cat /proc/ide/hda/capacity
    240121728
    
    # cat /proc/ide/hda/geometry
    physical     16383/16/63
    logical      16383/255/63
    
    # df
    Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
    /dev/md1               1928980   1017240    813752  56% /
    /dev/md2               1928980     96960   1734032   6% /var
    /dev/md5               1928980     33176   1797816   2% /tmp
    /dev/md6             111392928   5846756  99887684   6% /home
    none                    258020         0    258020   0% /dev/shm
    Note that the disks are "md" because it's a RAID setup. Maybe this will help you.

    Also note the above came from an up-to-date (CentOS+BQ) system.

  9. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by OBLtd
    That said I still might upgrade both machines, so if you could post a pointer to the most recent 2.10.3 ROM instructions I would be grateful.
    Here's the best place to get it: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cobalt-rom/

    These documents are out of date but still somewhat useful: http://www.hockin.org/~thockin/cobalt-hack-faq.html and http://the.taoofmac.com/space/HOWTO/...%20to%20RAQ550

    The upgrade instructions for StrongBolt are here: http://www.osoffice.co.uk/strongbolt...ash_howto.html and the OS install instructions are here: http://www.osoffice.co.uk/sb_install_disc_info.html

    Good luck!

  10. #10
    Join Date
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    You really need to be carefull about flashing the ROMS! one bad move can send you over to raqware and 130 usd later you can try again...

    I perfer to load the RaQ4 os fresh and then go at it using the flashtool and then verifying it... I also use the serial port method as needed..

    If you download the utils from cobalt-rom there is a README that explains how to use the flashtool

    Been there and done this too...

  11. #11
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    Just to close the post about disk size and reports, this is what I get from the following commands:

    /sbin/hdparm -i /dev/hda

    /dev/hda:

    Model=IC35L080AVVA07-0, FwRev=VA4OA52A, SerialNo=VNC402A4CY9ZBA
    Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs }
    RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=52
    BuffType=3(DualPortCache), BuffSize=1863kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
    DblWordIO=no, OldPIO=2, DMA=yes, OldDMA=2
    CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=-66060037, LBA=yes, LBAsects=160836480
    tDMA={min:120,rec:120}, DMA modes: mword0 mword1 mword2
    IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, PIO modes: mode3 mode4
    UDMA modes: mode0 mode1 *mode2 mode3 mode4 mode5

    cat /proc/ide/hda/capacity
    160836480

    cat /proc/ide/hda/geometry
    physical 159560/16/63
    logical 159560/16/63

    df
    Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
    /dev/hda1 2975022 631209 2343813 22% /
    /dev/hda3 1492343 22822 1469521 2% /var
    /dev/hda4 9224935 211130 9013805 3% /home

    I’m still not quite clear what that tells me, but I thought I might take some of the good advice in this post and try a ROM upgrade. I’ve downloaded the following package ROM-update-2.3.35-1.pkg, but before I run that I wondered how can I tell which version of the ROM have I currently got?

    I’ve got some other install/upgrade questions, but that’s getting a bit off topic for this post so I’ll ask those elsewhere.

    Thanks.

  12. #12
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    df -h will show you your disk space in human readable mode.

    I wondered how can I tell which version of the ROM have I currently got?
    You can watch the serial port terminal at boot and it's the first thing to come up. or from the command line you can do a
    cmos -c romrev
    and that will tell you.

    Make Your You Verify Your installed ROM before REBOOTING!

  13. #13
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    How do I Verify the installed ROM before REBOOTING please?

  14. #14
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    The README tells how: (this is from memory, please sub the appropriate program names!)

    # we'll assume you saved the original ROM!
    # flashtool -r > newrom.rom # read back what you've written
    # cmp 2.10.3-ext3.rom newrom.rom # compare it to what you wrote


    This doesn't protect you from burning the wrong ROM! Make sure you picked the correct one.
    Last edited by gnetwerker; 11-30-2006 at 01:52 PM.

  15. #15
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    I must confess all these directions for the ROM upgrade went over my head a bit, so at the risk of turning the RAQ into a boat anchor, I just installed the ROM-update-2.3.35-1.pkg I’d got from Zeffie.

    I’m please to say that everything went smoothly, I’ve now got a ROM that says 2.3.35 and the RAQ also correctly reports the 80GB HDD.

    So all round a result!

    Thank you all for your help.

  16. #16
    Join Date
    Aug 2006
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    275
    Glad it worked out. You did the right thing -- you don't want to be flashing ROMs if you're not comfortable with it.

    I did find out, however, that the StrongBolt install automatically updates your ROM for you, like the old Sun restore did under certain circumstances. This is not an endorsement to change if the Raq4 OS is working for you though. Just be sure it's fully patched.

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