If you are going to use the drive for Linux, tell the CMOS that the drive has the correct number of heads and sectors, and tell it that there are as many cylinders as you can up to the actual amount - cmos might not be able to deal with more than 1024.
If for some reason you can't do that, you can probably tell CMOS almost anything, and the drive will emulate what you tell CMOS. This is used to get around the 1024-cylinder limit by increasing the number of heads and decreasing the cylinders by a corresponding factor - for example you might be able to double the head count and halve the cylinders. You may then have to play with the "expert" menu in fdisk to get Linux to treat the drive the same way BIOS does. You might have to do something similar for LILO, but since this is the second drive, LILO isn't a problem, you'll have your boot block on a partition on the first drive. Disk "geometry" is a fiction these days. Internally, the drives have a different number of sectors per track depending on whether it's the inside, middle, or the outside tracks. The drive emulates something with fixed geometry so that BIOS doesn't get confused. Bruce -- Bruce Perens K6BP [EMAIL PROTECTED] 510-215-3502 Finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] for PGP public key. PGP fingerprint = 88 6A 15 D0 65 D4 A3 A6 1F 89 6A 76 95 24 87 B3 -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .