I never saved any of the logs, but basically no matter what OS (Linux) I used, I could not get my 1000GB hard drive to work (Seagate SATA).  The BIOS recognizes the drive and fdisk -l shows the hard drive as it should.

The tricky thing is that different OS's will give you different results, but don't be fooled.  You can't use these larger drives for long.  I was getting all kinds of seek/IO errors and also messages that the port could not be read.

In one custom kernel I had, what would happen is that after attempting to format a 900GB partition, the whole drive became invisible and inaccessible to the kernel (if you attempt to format a smaller amount it might work, but make no mistake it will be unstable and the symptoms I describe will invetiably happen at some point and fortunately I discovered it before putting these into production again).  An fdisk -l would only show the 500GB drive and not the 1000GB drive.  Updating the BIOS to Tyan's latest did not help either.

In Centos 5.3 the symptoms I had were the same messages, but a worse effect.  After the I/O errors it caused both SATA ports to become unusable at that point, so you couldn't run any command on your server until you reboot.  I'm sure this is a limitation of the BIOS or SATA chipset and I don't see any work around, this is either a BIOS or SATA chipset issue and I doubt Tyan has any plans for an update (considering the last update was in 2005). I hope this saves someone else the trouble, hassle and headache.

I know for sure 500GB Seagate drives work, since this is what I have in them.  I'm not sure if 750GB would work since I don't have any of those drives around.

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