RumpDisk

The Hurd supports modern SATA devices like HDDs and SSDs (not PATA/IDEs yet) with RumpDisk, and by default, the amd64 Hurd uses Rumpdisk. We intend to replace the old and unmaintained dde disk drivers with RumpDisk. If you are using dde, then your drivers are baked into the GNU Mach kernel and cannot support a drive larger than 128GB! With rumpdisk, you can enjoy a max partition size of 2 TiB!

If you are using a 32 bit Hurd and want to try rumpdisk, then change any occurrence of hdN in /boot/grub/grub.cfg to wdN, where N is a number, and add the noide option on the multiboot line, (which disables the old Linux disk drivers). Also change any occurrence of hdN in your /etc/fstab to wdN.

/boot/grub/grub.cfg

# multiboot /boot/gnumach-1.8-486.gz root=part:2:device:hd0 console=com0
multiboot   /boot/gnumach-1.8-486.gz root=part:2:device:wd0 console=com0 noide

/etc/fstab

#/dev/hd0s2      /               ext2    defaults        0       1
/dev/wd0s2      /               ext2    defaults        0       1
#/dev/hd0s1      none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/wd0s1      none            swap    sw              0       0
#/dev/hd2        /media/cdrom0   iso9660 noauto          0       0
/dev/wd2        /media/cdrom0   iso9660 noauto          0       0

Then reboot your machine. Before Grub appears change "compatibility" in your BIOS to "AHCI" (not "RAID"). If you successfully boot, congrats! You are now using rumpdisk! You can permanently add in the "noide" option to grub:

/etc/default/grub

# make sure you add this next line somewhere in the file
GRUB_CMDLINE_GNUMACH="noide"

Now you can run update-grub. That way when you update the kernel, you can be sure to use rumpdisk.

rumpdisk is normally already set up on /dev/rumpdisk.

$ showtrans /dev/rumpdisk
/hurd/rumpdisk