> I can think of a few workarounds, all bad: > - add a partitioning tool (or option to qemu-img) to format the disk, > placing the first partition on the fourth cylinder, aligning it. tell > the users not to wipe the disks out but instead install to one of the > existing parititions
Well, that one slightly modified could work out quite well, at least for linux. As far I know the linux kernel uses the geometry provided by the storage adapter only in case the disk is blank. If there is a partition table present on the disk, the linux kernel will calculate the geometry based on that. Background for this is that scsi disks have no disk geometry, they just have a bunch of sectors. The scsi hostadapter bioses have to pull out some geometry out of thin air to satisfy ms-dos and real os boot loaders, and there was no standard on how to do that. Thus moving disks from one scsi adapter to another may result in hba-reported and on-disk geometry being different, and the only sane way to deal with that is using the on-disk geometry. With LBA this is much less an issue these days though. So qemu-img could create a partition table, containing one partition, hinting 32 sectors/cylinder. Linux should keep that geometry then, even when distro installers are deleting the partition and creating their own scheme. Dunno how what *BSD or Windows guests will deal with that though. cheers, Gerd -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
