Linux-Hams archive - February 1998: RE: fdisk question

RE: fdisk question

Yubyub Bird (terhi.victor@logonet.com)
Fri, 20 Feb 1998 12:33:28 -0500


>> If you don't have LBA on your bios, ie: old junker motherboard,
>>or, if you just want to, can you use the "expert" part of fdisk and divide
>>the number of cylinders by 2, but add 1 back and multiply the number of
>>heads by 2?

>From my understanding Linux by-passes the "bios" of a system and set ups
>it's own.
>
>My old 486DX2-66 M/B does NOT have LBA but linux easily detects and
>accesses the 2.1G/B Hard drive.

Yes - that's true; usually an IDE won't cause problems with the kernel. The
only problem is to get it to work with LILO, which can be quite a task for
certain drives; but that problem can't usually be solved by fdisk, (besides
creating partitions that are within the limits of the BIOS addressable space).
I'm not quite sure of any reason why someone would want to change the
geometry as Karl has suggested, as the Kernel doesn't have the same limits
as the BIOS; I suppose some reasons may exist, though.

terhi.victor@logonet.com
"I had to laugh like hell." - Vonnegut