I've managed to trash my disk today, and now I think I have a vague
understanding why. (Luckily, I made a backup before I really did some
damage.) I was installing 2.1.117 on a machine running 2.1.116, and
lilo complained about the partitioning. I tried to have lilo fix
it...anyway, here's what happened.
My machine is a HP Pavilion 8260, which is a PII/266 with a LX chipset
and a IDE Quantum Bigfoot CY4320A. I had my BIOS set to do "DOS"
geometry translation, giving the drive a 560/240/63 geometry.
Everyone seemed happy with this, until 2.1.116.
Even though it detected the geometry as 560/240/63, and there was an
existing, fully populated partition with this geometry, it decided to
do LBA addressing, reporting a line:
hda: [LBA] [527/255/63]
which is wrong!
I had been running 2.1.115 with no problems on this machine, and I
noticed a comment in the 2.1.116 patch for linux/drivers/block/ide.c,
which says:
+ * Version 6.18 default unpartitioned-disk translation now "BIOS LBA"
It seems like this happened to me on a regularly partitioned disk.
Now, if I create partitions under 2.1.117, 2.0.34 (which is on my
rescue disk) recognizes the LBA geometry (saying [PTBL] instead of
[LBA]), and Linux fdisk causes no problems. Partition Magic, however,
considers this partitioning to be broken.
If I set the bios translation to "Other", on boot I get a line saying
CHS=8960/15/63, and on a clean disk I consistently get 527/255/63
geometry from Linux fdisk, no matter what kernel. However, if
partitions exist from the 560/240/63 geometry, 2.0.34 correctly
defaults to it, but 2.1.117 reports the LBA geometry.
I can provide more details if needed. Also, I'm willing to do some
destructive experiments before I restore the drive. Any suggestions?
--Anil
-- Anil Somayaji (soma@cs.unm.edu) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~soma +1 505 872 3150--pgp-sign-Multipart_Thu_Aug_20_22:31:12_1998-1 Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
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