Category: Linux

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Gparted, 137 gb, 48 bit LBA and You

It was an interesting situation. Someone called with a hard drive that was always reading 137gb in windows even though it was 250gb. My first thought was that perhaps it wasn’t partitioned completely, I recommended maybe using fdisk on windows or downloading the latest GParted live CD to look at the partition scheme.

After I hung up the phone I did a little surfing and found out this 137gb limit all had to do with Logical Block Addressing or LBA for short. Older computers were not equipped to handle drives with 48 bit LBA and Windows did not support it by default until SP1.

If your still hung up with this problem a BIOS update for your motherboard or upgrades for windows may solve it. However you still might end up with a drive that needs partitioning. The Gparted liveCD is perfect for this. With it you can create, destroy, shrink or grow partitions of all types and sizes. Best of all you can do it all without damaging the data on your hard drive. Though it is highly recommended that you backup your existing data in case anything goes wrong.

This particular problem doesn’t affect Linux by the way. Linux completely ignores the BIOS when it comes to hard drives and uses its own addressing scheme.

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Linux Supports Microsoft MN-130 Network Card Unlike Windows

I recently was asked to troubleshoot a computer with network problems.

The computer had a Microsoft MN-130 network card installed but the proper software was not. Seeing as it’s a Microsoft card I thought for sure the drivers would be available within Windows XP. A few clicks and the computer would be fixed.

I suppose if it was that simple then someone would have done so. Upon running the add new hardware wizard I was left with a very long pause which eventually led to the software not being found.

Then interestingly enough Windows XP offered to download the driver for the network card from the Internet. I almost thought of clicking the button just to see it choke up but I had already wasted enough time.

So I scoured the Internet looking for the driver. I found plenty of sleazy download driver sites that claimed to have it but all but one led me to the same broken link on Microsoft’s website. One seemed to actually host the file, but after a series of approximately ten annoying advertisements I was rewarded only with a 404 not found error. I checked newsgroups and ftp searches to no avail.

I thought I’d have to buy a new one. Network cards are fairly cheap but it still bothered me that here was a perfectly good one that just wouldn’t work because of a silly missing driver.

So I wondered if Linux supported it. A check on the Internet led me to a post where someone had hacked it to work by recompiling a driver module. The post was dated 2003 and I thought maybe by now someone had implemented this hack permanently.

I am happy to say Puppy Linux picked it up upon booting. And no work was required to get it working. So much for Microsoft.

In the end I ended up swapping cards with this particular machine and charging the owner twenty dollars for my time and the discomfort of running a Microsoft card in a Linux machine. I probably should have charged more for the ugly stigmata. Anyone know of any other Microsoft hardware supported by Linux and not it’s creator?