On Sat, 15 May 1999, Charles M Stapleton wrote:
>
> I have a 4GB hdd. In the bios I can set it up with three different
modes (see
> the table below)
>
>
Options Size Cyls Head Precomp Landz Sector Mode
>
2 1979 959 64 0 4091 63
LBA
>
1 1980 4092 15 65535 4091 63
Normal
>
3 1980 2046 30 65535 4091 63
Large
>
Your BIOS is the same age as mine, but your hd is newer ;-). I have
only a 1.2 gb hd, so it is all accessible to the bios and lilo with bios
option 2. You can use option 2 "LBA" with linux. I do. It isn't
really LBA, but it works. The linux ide driver asks the hd what it is,
and is able to work with the answer it gets, but if you want to be able
to boot from this hd with lilo, you want to make a partition that is
within the first 1979mb for kernel images and lilo to live in. It is
common to name this /boot and make it small (20-50mb), but if you like
you can put your root partition (/) in the first 1979 mb, and use the
rest for /usr, /home...
Disk druid or cfdisk or fdisk should be able to make partitions of any
size you like, within the limits of the hardware. Fdisk may complain
about overlapping partitions, but it should work anyway. (there are two
descriptions of each partition in the MBR. One of them is a 3 byte
CHS thing that can not _possibly_ describe anything bigger than 2gb, but
fdisk _checks_ both.) Bear in mind, though, that a hd can only have 4
primary partitions, and if there are any secondary partitions, one of
the primary partitions must tell where they are, so if you mean to have
more than 4 partitions, it is best to create a secondary partition early
on.
Actually, the more I look at it, that bios looks broken. I am used to
seeing alternate modes with 64, 32, and 16 heads (probably, the drive
only has 2, but it does a bit of mapping itself. But it would be
senseless to map 2 heads to 15, when the limit of the hardware is 16,
and that makes easier arithmetic. Perhaps it is the drive that is
broken. No matter. If win9x can work with it, linux should be able to.
>
> In win9X I use the option 2. I plan in the future to use the drive
totally for
> linux. under the table in the bios it says that some oses require the
use of
> the Normal mode (like sco-unix). I was wondering if this applied to
linux
> since they are both un*x.
>
> another question is if I use the wrong setting then can this cause
potential
> damage to the hdd?
No. If you have a VLB system, and the CMD640 IDE interface chip, and
use both channels, and don't tell the IDE driver cmd640_vlb, it will
make garbage out of the data on your hd, but you can format it and use
it again. If you have a PCI system, relax. The IDE driver can detect
the PCI version of the CND640 chip annd take evasive action. I have one
of these.
>
> when I boot with the root disk (or cdrom) it reads the drive as a
1888MB. Why?
> and is this appropriate for the drive?
I think that is just reporting what the BIOS told it. It will get
around to asking the hd directly.
>
> will I have to put two partitions or more on this drive? id so, how
should I
> arrange then?
>
If you want to boot it with lilo, I would make a partition /boot and put
it in the first 500m of the drive. The rest you can divide as you see
fit. Particularly for a single user system, there is no compelling
reason to break it up, so you might have, /boot, 0-50mb (or whatever
constitutes a neat number of cylinders), and /, all the rest.
> thanks for your patience. I have learnt alot from this mailing list.
>
Lawson
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