Subject: Drive geometry problem
I've used LFS to create a LFS bootable CD. (with some changes of course..)
I'm using a 2.6.10 kernel on the cdrom and Im testing the cd on an old Dell
P3-500 Mhz with an IBM ATA 20GB drive. Works pretty good with 1 exception:
Disk utils cannot read the drive geometry of IDE hardrive on the booted system.
Here's why...
my 2.6.10 kernel IDE driver detects the HD geometry at boot time as:
44150400 LBA sectors CHS: 43800/16/63
This is good.
The proc filesystem shows in /proc/ide/ide0/hda/geometry:
physical 16383/16/63
logical 43800/16/63
Although the pysical is the kernel saying.. "uh.. bigger than 8GB..." The
logical is correct... This is good.
hdparm -g /dev/hda shows:
43800/16/63
This is good.
{s,c,}fdisk -l /dev/hda says:
/dev/hda 82220544 bytes, 82MB, 16 heads, 63 sectors, 159 Cylendars
This is BAD! It appears that the disk utils are using the (incorrectly
reported) physical geometry instead of the logical. I know I can force the
partition data in the kernel params but this is a bootable CD intended to run
on not just 1 machine so that isn't a valid option. I can manually force the
partitions in fdisk, but I don't want to have to do that on every machine I use
my cd on.
If I boot a 2.4.x kernel on the same machine (knoppix cd) the
/proc/ide/ide0/hda/geometry reports :
physical 43800/16/63 (note: this it the same as "logical" on 'my' boot cd)
logical 2748/255/63
and fdisk, hdparm, parted etc. all work correctly.
Any Ideas what is going on?
Thanks -Tyler
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