It appears, as if the drive is really approaching breakdown, remapping bad sectors and is out of spare sectors. Thus reducing capacity. The call to determine the native sectors seems to still count in those remapped sectors, yielding an effectively bogus number.
Perhaps the drive had originally 78165361 sectors, and (speculating further) the problems only started to show up, when the "current" sectors dropped down to 78165360, while the "native" sectors remained at 78165361. Since I've got no precious data on that disk (anymore), I'll just watch it, until it suffers the final headcrash. PS: It would still be good to be able to turn off hpa-checking with some module/boot-option to help with any drives that return effectively wrong "native" capacity (whether they're actually broken, or might just have a broken firmware). - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/