On Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:17:33 -0500 Daniel Malament <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm trying to pull data off an old MFM HD, and I've gotten to the > point where the only obstacle is disk geometry. I have a P3 machine > which will disable the primary IDE controller in favor of the MFM > controller, but boot off of an OpenBSD disk on the secondary IDE. > OpenBSD sees the MFM disk just fine, but gives it the wrong CHS, > which wouldn't matter except that it's evidently too old to do LBA, > since OpenBSD is using CHS mode. I can pull the first few sectors > off of the disk, but then I get errors I'm guessing are because of > the geometry mismatch. > > Is there any way at all to change the CHS values the kernel is using > for a disk? fdisk with -chs doesn't seem to produce a permanent > change (I guess the values are just used for calculating?), and the > machdep.bios.etc sysctls are read-only. Google and the archives > haven't turned up anything terribly useful, although it sounds like > what I'm trying to do may not be possible. If not, anyone have any > alternate suggestions? > > Incidentally, I have a bunch of other old crap around, but my efforts > to get everything working on a machine that will let me set the CHS > in the BIOS haven't gotten anywhere yet... > in the mid 80s was there list att bbs with all sorts of data, after all it was impossible to guess. but with thos list we coud gess or trye a cupel of good geses. But how big is your HD, and one more thing if you dont can edit your hd config in bios (hed, chs, lz).then i dont think you can pull this thing off. in the future rwite down all info on the hd. it is normal praktiks, well they stop doing it in sata, and not all ide but many older ide goot it.
