Re: possible bug in ide-disk.c (2.6.18.2 but also older)

[Alan <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

> While I used Knoppix to determine the age of the bug, it does also
> appear with a plain vanilla 2.6.18.2 kernel from www.kernel.org.
> The ChangeLog for 2.6.18.3 also doesn't mention ide-disk.

The old IDE layer does not currently have a maintainer.
 
> I must admit, I don't know about GPT.  My system's bios
> is old enough to not know about EFI, and the partition-scheme
> on that harddisk dates back quite a few years, so it's unlikely
> to be anything than the good ol' MBR.

The reason I ask is that they put the partition in the last sector which
means a block read of the last sector goes off the end of the disk and
certainly used to be mishandled by the IDE code.

> Alternatively, a kernel-option to manually disable hpa-checking
> would be a good step to solve the problem even for drives like mine.

It's a compile time option. If you don't have GPT partitioning support
then the system ought to behave correctly.

Alan