Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 23 Jan 1999 00:05:52 +0000 | From | Ben Hutchings <> | Subject | Re: 10.2 Gig HDD |
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On Thu, Jan 21, 1999 at 04:58:28PM +0100, Max wrote: <snip> > Now, IDE disks can have at most 16 *physical* heads. If you tell the kernel > that the geometry of your disk is 787/128/63 (as with my 3G Western Digital) > the kernel will use the *physical* geometry 6296/16/63 for C/H/S addressing > (it's deduced from the logical geometry you specify, knowing Heads<=16) > or will use LBA, knowing that the disk has 6346368 sectors (approx 3GB). <snip>
The `physical geometry' is no more real than the `logical geometry' - it's just the drive's lies rather than the BIOS's lies.
Today's hard drives divide the disk surface into concentric zones with differing numbers of sectors-per-track. This is hardly a new trick, but it still makes it impossible to describe the geometry in C/H/S terms even without the stupid limitations on those numbers.
-- Ben Hutchings, software engineer | web site to be reconstructed at some time womble@ferret.lmh.ox.ac.uk | Team *AMIGA* | Jay Miner Society - www.jms.org Absolutum obsoletum. (If it works, it's out of date.) - Stafford Beer
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