Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 20 Jan 1999 21:57:40 +0000 | From | Neil Conway <> | Subject | Re: 10.2 Gig HDD |
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Hmm, perhaps you can clarify something that confuses me...
If you do invent your own geometry, how does the DRIVE know what you are using? Suppose for example, the drive has native geometry of 3200,16,63 and you decide you want to have less than 1000 cylinders, so you pick something like 800,64,63. When the drive is first asked for Sector (1,62,54) it can make a good guess that you have got a custom geometry, but if you have previously asked it for Sector (1,2,2) will it have given you the wrong sector? If not, who told it that the geometry was custom... In DOS, perhaps the boot sector? In Linux, the LILO boot sector?
This has been bugging me.
Yesterday I performed a horrifically crude hack to get just such a disk working on an old machine. The default RH5.2 installation didn't want to let us build a single partition due to the disk having more than 1024 cylinders (and thus LILO might possibly crash and burn). So, not being totally confident about hacking the partition table directly with Linux's fdisk, I booted DOS (oh the shame :-)) and used MS-fdisk to make a partition. This made a suitably translated partition table (roughly the above values), which Linux of course happily honoured. (Obviously I wiped the DOS partition though.)
I'd rather not have to use DOS again in similar circumstances (!)...
I have btw read the Large-disk HOWTO (very educational) but am still confused as to the above point.
Neil
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