I just received my new hard-drive, a Maxtor Diamonstar 90 – 8M (read 80Go and 8M of cache). So I decided to fdisk + cp -a my old distros to the new drive. Everything is ok .. I have something like this:
/dev/hda1 Win (I don't install this but leave a blank fat32 .. if) /dev/hda2 Linux (my current debian) /dev/hda3 BSD (NetBSD I think) /dev/hda4 Data (10Go for what you wants)
After I finish my cp -a /dev/hda2 /dev/hdc2, I just chroot to this and run grub-install. Ok .. that’s fine (no error message), it’s time to reboot.
Ouch! My new system doesn’t want to boot, I get a ‘SYSTEM BOOT FAILURE, INSERT BOOT DISK …’ hum .. that’s sucks! Ok .. boot from a rescue CD (which I really love after a day of issue on this HD), just chroot to my new drive install Lilo instead of grub .. => Crash .. oh god .. I tried it a several times and have random crash. After 2 hours, I discover that the HD have some issues with the Prefetch Read/Write, so I disable it.. Ok, no more random crash. Now I need to fix the boot error issue. I tested several things, and took me a lot of time and i discover something. In my bios (I even made a new bios install), the default option is ‘auto detect’ from the kind of HD: Large / LBA / CHS.. And this fucking HD is detected as a CHS, so I forced it to LBA, and now it works. In fact the OS doesn’t bios so it can read/write on the HD, but Lilo or Grub use the bios directly.
To resume Maxtor DiamonStar:
- Doesn’t support Read / Write prefetch
- Do some bad thing w/ bios detection (I never seen this before ooo)
- Are really quiet
- Perform quite well: 56Mbs/sec in hdparm -t (far from my 110Mbs/ SCSI HD but..)
- Are damn hot (really really hot !!)
I destroy 2 Maxtor HD in a previous life, I hope this one will work a bit longer. Anyway, this is really the last time I buy this shit.