On Jul 24, Adrian Phillips wrote:
> Okuji> This is meaningless. This just tells you what _Linux_
> Okuji> sees, but not what GRUB sees. Instead, execute the command
> Okuji> "geometry" in the native environment.
>
> Sorry, didn't realise this;
> [...]
> Anyway, I'll install Linux on a not in production machine and rerun
> the geometry command. Thank you.
Just to make it clear, you can't set geometry in the native
environment; grub bootsector needs the geometry to load stage2 and it
queries the BIOS. A geometry command issued from menu.lst would come
too late. Changing geometry from native environment isn't implemented.
The problem is that some BIOSes are broken. My BIOS still report
the geometry for a 1.44 MB disk when booting from ZIP. DOS works
because it gets the geometry from its boot sector and the BIOS is
silently manipulating that to provide the correct values.
It is possible to change grub to honor the fields in the DOS boot
sector. I wrote a patch some time ago, but it doesn't apply cleanly
anymore, since the boot sector changed for the --force-lba option.
The main problem is to add this feature, without getting beyond the
512 byte boot sector limit.
Jochen
