Hi!
As you probably already know I have problems with one of my
partitions. To be more exact my Linux root partition.
So I started taking notes regarding the numbers that
describe my hard drive. AFAIK windoze uses the bios to do that
autodetection of part of the hardware, while Linux uses the bios as
little as possible.
And here are the numbers:
- first I redid that autodetection from bios. And I faced
three options:
opt size cyls head precomp lands sect mode
1(y) 8447 1027 255 0 16382 63 LBA
2 8455 16383 16 65535 16382 63 normal
3 8452 2047 128 65535 16382 63 large
The first one is marked with that (y) so I guess that is
what the bios recommends. I went for normal when I installed the
drive first because those are the numbers (C/H/S) that are printed
on the drive - there wasn't any manual or instruction book with it.
And it seems to be the largest version.
-second there is the report that bios does after post. So
for the matter of speed, there isn't done any autodetection at boot
time. The bios knows that the primary master IDE drive is the
second option (the normal drive). This report looks like this:
Pri. master: CHS, UDMA 2, 8455M
Sec. master: LBA, Mode 3, 560M
The secondary master is my old drive which works perfectly.
Here are some things that puzzle me. So the first field of the
description should be that LBA/normal/large thing. What is CHS?
Cyls/Heads/Sectors? Than the second field. I'm guessing Mode 3
means the third PIO mode. There are 4 PIO modes standard and a few
others. UDMA 2 is related with PIO? Sizes are accurate.
-third and last this is what Linux autodetects... it can be
seen with dmesg.
hda: <the drive id which seems ok> 8063MB w/416kB Cache, LBA,
CHS=16383/16/63
How come the size is 8063? None of the options were like
that. I don't know about the cache. But my 'normal' drive is now
LBA? And at the same time the CHS are correct. Afaik in case the
drive is seen uncorrectly I can define the C/H/S. But nothing more.
Guys, is there a problem? All I know is that something is
messing up with my root partition.
Also, can somebody spend some time to explain me the parts I
don't know? Or at least point me a etext somewhere on the net that
describes this kind of stuff.
Thanks in advance,
Raider
--
``Liberate tu-temet ex inferis''
