Re: 2.6 and IDE "geometry"

[John Bradford]

Quote from Sven Luther <sven.luther@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 08:44:39PM +0100, Andries Brouwer wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 01:17:04PM -0500, Wakko Warner wrote:
> > 
> > > Is there anyway to get kernel 2.6 to use the geometry
> > > the bios has for an IDE drive?
> > 
> > The kernel does not use any geometry.
> > 
> > > I have a installation setup that installs a non-linux os and I partition the
> > > drive under linux.  In 2.4 this has worked flawlessly, however, 2.6 reports
> > > as # cylinders/16 heads/63 sectors.
> > 
> > Aha. So your real question is:
> > "Is there any way to get *fdisk to use my favorite geometry?"
> > The answer is: all common fdisk versions allow you to set the geometry.
> 
> I believe parted does not. Nor any of the libparted frontends. I may be
> wrong though.

If so, I consider it a missing feature in parted - why should the BIOS
geometry resemble the disk it describes at all?  Some machines have no
user-definable drive types, forcing you to use an incorrect geometry
if you install a disk which is not in the table of supported drives.

This is no problem for recent Linux kernels, and doesn't even prevent
you booting from that disk.

John.
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