[DRBD-user] CHS versus LBA

Casey Allen Shobe lists at seattleserver.com
Sun Feb 19 01:07:34 CET 2006

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


I recently set up a new DRBD+heartbeat cluster for our webmail servers.

All works well but...

I'm a bit concerned because the partitions aren't exactly the same size.

The hard disks are PATA disks in identical models in identical machines, and I 
created them exactly the same in fdisk - by using +4G as the size.  Problem 
is, which I discovered after the fact, is that one machine shows the drive's 
partition table in CHS notation, and the other LBA, so for whatever reason, 
fdisk interpreted +4G differently on each.

So here's what I have now:

*** NODE 1:

Device Model:     FUJITSU MPF3102AT
Serial Number:    05119851
Firmware Version: 0028

Disk /dev/hda: 10.2 GB, 10248118272 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1245 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1               1          32      257008+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda2   *          33         519     3911827+  83  Linux
/dev/hda3             520        1245     5831595   83  Linux


*** NODE 2:

Device Model:     FUJITSU MPF3102AT
Serial Number:    05117966
Firmware Version: 0028

Disk /dev/hda: 10.2 GB, 10248118272 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19857 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1               1         497      250456+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda2   *         498        8248     3906504   83  Linux
/dev/hda3            8249       19857     5850936   83  Linux


hda3 is what drbd0 uses.  As you can see the block size is different for each.  
It contains a reiserfs partition and doesn't seem to be causing any 
problems...yet...but it concerns me.  I don't have any recollection of which 
machine the filesystem was mkfs'd on.

The real question here is why is one disk shown using CHS instead of LBA?  I 
checked the BIOS's on both machines, and both have LBA enabled.

I don't mind rebuilding one of the nodes in order to get this remedied - does 
anybody know how to fix it?  Somebody I was talking to said that a product 
called 'spinrite' might fix the drive, but he wasn't certain.

-- 
Casey Allen Shobe | cshobe at seattleserver.com | 206-381-2800
SeattleServer.com, Inc. | http://www.seattleserver.com



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