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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