Hello, Erich!
> > This time BIOS apparently believes that all diskettes in 2.88M drives
> > should also be 2.88M
> > Stage1 tries to read sectors above 18 and gets an error.
>
> The point is that, with the iterative probe, both the stage1 and stage2
> should not believe the BIOS anyway.
Neither BIOS nor the iterative probe can be trusted. I don't know what
GRUB should do if for a 1.44M diskette BIOS says it's a 1.2M drive and
allows to read sector 36.
> Has this been changed since the old GRUB 0.5? It was there for a
> reason.
The change was that BIOS now has priority.
> > Possible solutions:
>
> Please don't store the disk geometry. There is very likely a way to make
> a reasonable probe that works, and in general, the geometry you'd need to
> program into it may not be discoverable under an OS not using the BIOS.
The current GRUB has the "geometry" command that makes is possible to set
the device geometry if the OS doesn't allow to determine it automatically.
Imagine that I want to write a bootable CD-ROM. I'm absolutely sure about
the geometry of the image, but I'm not so sure about BIOS'es on the
machines where the CD will be used.
Yet another solution would be optional hardcoding of geometry when a
special flag is given to the "install" command (like "d" that hardcodes
the drive number).
Unfortunately, this will not help people using "dd" for installation.
Pavel Roskin
