*BSD News Article 45969


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From: peter@citylink.dinoex.sub.org (Peter Much)
Subject: Re: Geometry Translation on IDE 1.2Gb
Organization: Buero fuer Sektenforschung und Qualitaetspruefung in der Esoterik
Message-ID: <DA5905.M9w@citylink.dinoex.sub.org>
References: <3rhvl0$ge2@hustle.rahul.net> <3rk8fj$5pa@tribune.usask.ca>
Date: Wed, 14 Jun 1995 03:43:17 GMT
Lines: 40

In article <3rk8fj$5pa@tribune.usask.ca>,
Bradley W Mazurek <bwm260@skorpio3.usask.ca> wrote:

>First, I had to change the IDE translation mode in my BIOS.  Rather than
>using LBA, I used Standard CHS.

Huh? IDE-Interface integrated into mainboard and doing nasty DOSish trans-
lation things by default? Usually, one only has to tell the mainboard
the true geometry of the drive in this step.

>When I went in to reparition the disk for
>DOS, DOS reported that the drive was only 523Mb (1023cyl, 64h, 63sec/tr),

Yes, that's fine. This limits DOS diskspace to these ~500MB per disk,
but there seems not to be an other solution.

>cylinders 1-999 were DOS.  That left cylinders 1000-1023 for NetBSD.  Lots
>of room!  :)  Anyway, on a hunch, a friend and I were hoping NetBSD didn't 
>look at the ending cylinder entry (1023) of the partition table.  Next I 
>calculated the length of the partition from 1000-2100, put this into the 
>partition table using the disk editor.  The numbers weren't consistent in 
>the parition table, but DOS ignored the Non-DOS partition, NetBSD was 
>happy...and we've (DOS, NetBSD and my remaining hair) all lived happily 
>ever after....

This should be made easier. All that is missing, is a reliable, DOS-com-
patible fdisk utility to be run from boot-disk. I'm using linux' fdisk
and linux' dd (no disklabels between) instead of a disk editor, and
consider this a bit more flexible (i can sub-divide above 1023), but
the general procedure is just the same.

I don't think this being a "trick"; back in the MFM times there were
already drives with >1024 cyls., which could only be fully used with unix-
like OS's. I once have installed Xenix on such hardware, and it was just
the same way.

Peter
-- 
  Write to:  Peter Much * Koelnische Str. 22 * D-34117 Kassel * +49-561-774961
 peter@citylink.dinoex.sub.org  much@hrz.uni-kassel.de   p.much@asco.nev.sub.de