Mark McRitchie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > > It does complain just before prompting to partition the drive about
> > > C/H/S not multiplying out to 3145728.
> >
> > Hm, this hurts. Are you sure about 3145728? Because that is supposed
> > to be the size of the disk in sectors (512 bytes each), which
> > multiplies out to 1.5 gigabytes. I am guessing your hard disk is
> > actually larger than that.
>
> Yep. It is/was.
>
> I'm trying to use vmware 4.5 as the install target for testing/devel
> purposes booting via pxe.
>
> I tried changing the size of the disk on IDE 0:0 (hda) and its now set at
> 4.5GB in size. The installer is now complaining that "C/H/S does not
> multiply out to 9437184" and then "Setting C/H/S for had to 587/255/62"
62? Not 63?
This smells like a VMware BIOS bug. I have never seen a hard drive
with 62 sectors. In fact, I have never seen a drive with any number
of sectors other than 63.
This would be an understandable mistake, since the BIOS interface is
supposed to return (heads - 1) but the sector count. If somebody were
writing their own BIOS and they were not careful, they might subtract
1 from both the head and sector counts...
> Its all virtual... :-\
Well, that is good news for me because it makes it less likely to be
my bug :-). Bad news for you since it puts lots of cooks in the
kitchen.
> Okay... But I have the horrid feeling that its going to be a bit
> different depending on the options the vmware VM was created
> with. Eg. I created a new VM to make sure it was clean, but the I
> accidentally set the first disk to be SCSI... Now when I boot that
> VM using Unattended I see SCSI drivers loading, despite the fact I
> killed out the scsi disk and added in an IDE one.
The drivers will load if SCSI hardware is present, whether or not it
has any disks attached. (In fact, there is no way for Linux to know
whether any disks are attached until it loads the SCSI driver.) This
is harmless.
But your problem is almost certainly a bug in VMware. Look under
/sys/firmware/edd/int13_dev80. This has the data returned by the BIOS
for the geometry of the drive. I am interested in the contents of
these files:
default_cylinder
default_heads
default_sectors_per_track
legacy_cylinders
legacy_heads
legacy_sectors
sectors
Don't worry; each file is only one line, and a short line at that.
> I get the horrid feeling that unattended under vmware is going to
> end up a "nice to have" but be a PITA to get going...
If this is a VMware bug, we can help them fix it.
Also, you can probably get Unattended working if you create a SCSI
system with a SCSI disk (no IDE). This "legacy geometry" garbage
generally only applies to IDE devices.
- Pat
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