On Sun, 13 Jun 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Windows 3 uses the BIOS. I don't know about the "or greater" windoze.
> I have never used any.
I used I guess every windoze version from 3.0 to the latest
95. I refused to install 98... political decision related with that
netscape trial. And I'm not a pro in this area but the way I see it
m$ uses to send a lozy update as a 'new improved system'. I checked
different versions (builds) of 95 and mostly there are new drives
sent as a new os. osr2 has some dlls from that 4.0.950 or even from
95 beta.
> > 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
> ^^^^ I don't like nor trust this. I could swallow 256 heads, but 255
> make me gag. The hardware registers allow for 16 heads and 64k
> cylinders and 255 sectors per track (starting with 1). Or 262144k
> sectors in LBA mode. (That's right, 128g bytes.) The BIOS calling
> sequence provides for 1024 cylinders, 64 heads, and 63 sectors. Okay,
> the top 2 bits of head # are undefined, so it could go to 256. But why
> use only 255? That just makes the mapping arithmatic harder. If there
> is a defined LBA mode for the BIOS I don't know of it. More likely
> there is a private understanding between hardware manufacturers and
> Micro$oft. There is also an unofficial standard that uses the top 2
> bits of the head number for cylinder number bits 10 and 11, for 4096
> "cylinders".
I don't know what to say. :(
> > 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
>
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ yep. :-)
But why does the string CHS apeared in the same field as
LBA? CHS should be followed by a drive description. While LBA is
the description. It's like mixing apples with the apple juice.
> > means the third PIO mode. There are 4 PIO modes standard and a few
> > others. UDMA 2 is related with PIO? Sizes are accurate.
> I don't know what the U is. DMA is direct memory access, meaning the
U means ultra. I check it out some time ago.
> channel does the IO to a block of physical memory. In PC's, it is used
> mostly for the floppy(!). With PIO, all data goes to and from the hd
> through the CPU. (This is why a good modem has a fifo :-).
UDMA... it's at 33 or at 66. But never saw 2. Maybe this
means UDMA/66. Not sure. I'm just guessing.
> > -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
> This is what linux gets by asking the drive what it is without using the
> BIOS. There is an identify drive command defined in the ANSII spec for
> ATA (IDE) drives. LBA here means that the drive is capable of using it,
> and if it sees bit 6 of the drive/head register set on any IO, it will
> interpret the other registers as a zero-based block addres rather than
> CHS. 8063 MB, where 1 MB = 1048576 bytes, not 1000000.
I know that. But I also knew that bios did the same
(1m=2^20octets)
> > 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.
> If the drive is capable of the hardware LBA, linux will use it
Makes sense. So it's not saying the drive is in LBA but
that it can be.
> By now you should have dosfsck, and bpe. I still don't trust the
> partition boot record in hda1.
Yes. I'll try them tomorrow night I think
> I see your old drive is on hdc. If you have a CMD640 ide interface chip
> that the IDE driver doesn't detect, this may scramble data on both
> drives. If you don't suffer from a CMD640, of course it's better to
> have the drives on different channels.
No. The other drive never had a problem. And this is
another disturbing fact. So the old drive is a 560M... 535M
actually samsung drive. I can consider it a no name. And still it
is about 5 years old. And in this 5 years it suffered quite a lot.
I used it as removable media in the freezing winter or in summer. I
did a lot of repartitioning. I formated it a lot. And there is no
problem, besided that lost clusters that appear in dos... that is a
system fault, not hardware related. At the same time my 8g quantum
with so many copyrighted standards written on its wrapping gives me
a headache.
> Lawson
Raider
--
``Liberate tu-temet ex inferis''
