Hi!
Bryan, I'll comment just where I don't agree with you.
On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, Bryan Scaringe wrote:
> 1) All disks over 540Mb have > 1024 cylinders.
My hard-drive is a 535M drive. Thus smaller than 540M. And it
has 1086 cylinders. At least this is what it is written on it. So the
limit (in megabytes) can be lower.
> 2) Due to BIOS restrictions, the IDE interface can only deal with
> 1024 cylinders.
Only when it comes to boot.
> Conclusion (thus far):
> The BIOS control over IDE interfaces can't deal with drives bigger than
> 540mb (1024 Cyl).
But BIOS isn't the one which handles your hard drive. It just
recognizes it and passes the information.
> 3) Linux gets its drive geometry info from the BIOS.
> Actually, so does Win/DOS (although indirectly, I don't know the details).
> Thus, they can't deal with drives over 540MB.
Nope. One example. This just happened less than a week ago. One
friend came to me to exchange some software. And he came with his
hard-drive (pretty much software ;-). I don't have my computer's case
closed. So I just took the wires from the CD-ROM drive and put them in
the new hard drive. I was talking with him during this time, so I forgot
to put the BIOS to autodetect the new hard drive. I rebooted. And the
drive was recognized. I mounted the partitions I need. And I discovered
after all was done that hard-drive wasn't in seen by BIOS.
> Conclusion (thus far):
> If you have a BIOS that "does" LBA, you can use large drives.
> Otherwise you are screwed.
If you get dos to boot, than you can use loadlin to boot after
that 1k cylinder. Else, you can try to put the Linux root partition
somewhere before that cylinder. dos/windoze won't see the difference.
For them their second partition is always D: no matter if it's the second
or the 20th partition.
> Thus far I can confirm all of this from first hand experience.
> I had a 1.5 gig drive on my old P-60 with an ancient BIOS.
> I could not use the full disk until I used the manufacturer-supplied
> drive-overlay program. But Linux couldn't use the disk, just windows.
> Linux had to sit on the second drive, 340Mb, 1010 Cyl.
You could make a small root partition with all that's needed and
put it before the 1k cylinder. Than, you can use the rest, by mounting
the other Linux partitions: one for /usr/local, one for /home and so on,
just the way you want it. It seems that the *nix world preffers to have
more partitions against the m$ way: one big disk.
> Conclusion (final):
> Your EIDE controller MAY only support up to an 8.2 gig drive.
This is not relevant for using drives. It's relevant for booting
different partitions. That is the limit BIOS 'sees'. Not Linux.
> Bryan Scaringe
Raider
--
``Liberate tu-temet ex inferis''
