On Dec 18, 2004, at 3:19 PM, Anthony Minchinton wrote:
Hi Sam,
the 128 GB Hard Drive limit is well known to pc users as a BIOS
issue, which I presume is the same for macs, based on the previous
hard drive size limitations experienced by both pc & mac users.
Regards Tony.
Are you asking a question in regards to a particular computer system
or OS release?
The limitation comes mainly from, at least in the Mac world,
non-support for 48 bit LBAs (logical block addresses) in the disk
drive controller and/or the ATAPI bus controller (or its firmware)
used on a particular system. All mac systems made since late 2000 or
early 2001 should have hardware support for drives greater then
128GB/130GB (depending on units being used) when attached via ATAPI
buses (note firewire interfaces, etc. never had this particular
limitation).
Also Mac OS X (Darwin) system supports very very large disks (and I
believe it always has). Also the HFS+ file system that Mac OS X uses
(Mac OS 8 & 9 used it as well by default IRCC) supports huge volumes
as well... as default configured 64 TB in size I believe
(<http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1150.html>).
This isn't a Darwin-specific discussion but I have something I need to
ask.
I experienced a similar situation just recently with this limitation.
I received as a gift a 200 GB IDE drive intending it to store
primarily music files (yes, I have a ton). I dropped it in a
Quicksilver G4 at the office and formatted.
You likely need to be using 10.2 or later on both systems to insure
proper disk partitioning of volume of this size.
I then took it home along with an Oxford 911 FW enclosure and began
ripping CDs over the Christmas holidays. I have a 15" Titanium
powerbook and had connected the FW enclosure and new drive to it. I
was nearing the end of my ripping adventure when the disk dropped off
the machine with a common warning about properly disconnecting
external volumes. I thought nothing of it and promptly unplugged and
replugged the FW drive. Nothing. I rebooted, still didn't show. I
ran Disk Utility which identified the firewire drive as 128 GB. Disk
Utility failed on repairing it so I booted from a Disk Warrior CD
which too identified that disk as 128 GB. The drive would not mount
on the desktop and could not be repaired by anything. I reformatted,
losing many many gig of music data in the process.
My question is: is there some technical limitation to firewire
(specifically Oxford 911 bridges) to handling large-capacity drives?
Forgive me if the answer's obvious, I've been busy re-ripping CDs.
Not a firewire issue to the best of my knowledge but possibly an issue
with the revision of or the firmware used by the Oxford bridge. Check
with the enclosure manufacture for latest firmware, etc.
