Re: Same HD, same settings, different geometry

Mike A. Harris (mharris@meteng.on.ca)
Fri, 18 Jun 1999 20:56:06 -0400 (EDT)


On Sat, 19 Jun 1999, Luca Montecchiani wrote:

>Hi all,
>in my Pc I've two IDE, hda ( primary on 1ide ) and hdc ( primary on 2ide ) the
>bios settings on the motherboard is auto/LBA for all 4 ide channels.
>
>The facts on kernel 2.x.x
>-------------------------
>When linux boots hda show the "bios" geometry (LBA), and hdc show the physical
>geometry. This worry me, but everything work fine and /proc/ide/hd*/geometry
>is my friend. Seeing those difference, especially in my office machine where
>hda and hdc are the same models make me unhappy :(
>I started to look in the code ( 2.2.10 ) to understand why...
>In short only hd's on the primary ide interface will showed with their bios/cmos
>geometry.

To avoid this problem, I religiously partition fresh factory
drives on a primary master or primary slave *always*. You only
need to make one partition. Then the drive can be moved to the
secondary without worry.

If you don't have a free primary, and cannot remove one of the
primary drives to do this, you can either shut the machine down
and boot off a boot floppy containing fdisk, after removing a
primary drive, and replacing it with the one you wish to
partition, or you can use a different computer to do the
partitioning.

It is a good workaround.

--
Mike A. Harris                   Linux advocate      GNU advocate
Computer Consultant                          Open Source advocate  

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot...

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