The ATA spec for the hardware interface for IDE hard disks says the
maximum head number as 15. 0 is valid, so there can be 16 heads. The
"physical" geometry is completely fictitious anyway (I opened up a
broken drive with 16 heads. It had 2.), so it is improbable that a big
hd would have only 15 "heads". I would try 16 for the second parameter.
If you arrived at the number of cylinders by calculation, you might try
recalculating that too. What 8M ide limit of linux? Linux uses the
hardware interface, ant the limit to that is 256m sectors, or 128g in
lba mode, only slightly less in chs (because there's no sector 0). Lilo
is a whole different bag of worms, howeverm as it needs the BIOS.
Lawson
>< Microsoft free environment
This mail client runs on Wine. Your mileage may vary.
On Wed, 21 Apr 1999, Dirk Fung wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I tried to install linux (slackware 3.6 and redhat 5.2) in a 10G hard
disk.
> Knowing the 8M ide limit of linux, I specified the geometry of the HD
> to the installation programs by entering
> boot: vmlinuz hda=20961,15,63 (in slackware), and
> boot: linux hda=20961,15,63 (in redhat).
> Still both trials failed in fdisk, cfdisk and Druid.
> They just couldn't write on the HD.
> (P.S. I boot on CDs and failed also when not specifying the HD
parameters.)
>
> How can I get over this?
> Thanks for your help in advance.
>
> ________
> Dirk
>
>
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