> From: Tom Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Wednesday, December 16, 1998 4:44 PM
>
>
> While I'm here... can anyone point me to a resource that describes what's
> happening when the BEGIN and START cylinders are not equal?
>
The Start cylinder is the actual cylinder number from the cylinder field in
the partition entry. Begin is the cylinder number calculated from the
start_sect value in the partition entry. This could therefore change if
you changed the geometry on your disk. I believe Linux only pays any real
attention to the begin cylinder. This is because of the limitations of the
original fdisk. It only allowed 1024 cylinders (10 bytes). Now when disks
can have 255 heads, 63 sectors, and still have way more than 1024
cylinders, that value can become useless. The kernel fdisk stuff looks at
the start_sect and nr_sect parameters of struct partition found in genhd.h.
Hope that helped. Sorry if it was a little off topic.
Brian Geisel
Microlite Corporation
