Re: Why check legacy partition table for non-legacy HDs?

[H. J. Lu]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2002 at 09:23:49AM +1000, Andrew Clausen wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 28, 2002 at 08:35:41AM -0700, H. J. Lu wrote:
> > My questions are what "legacy" is and if it supports cylinders > 1024.
> 
> When we're talking about legacy, we're only talking about BIOSes
> (and systems that use the BIOS - and perhaps DOS fdisk).
> 
> > As far as I know, the "legacy" BIOS doesn't support cylinders > 1024.
> > You can't use the "legacy" BIOS with cylinders > 1024.
> 
> "Cylinders" isn't a value you have access to.  In fact, we can't ask
> the BIOS anything.  All information we get is deduced.
> 
> So, while it's true that legacy BIOSes will never have > 1024 cylinders,
> there's no reliable way for Linux or Parted to know if the BIOS believes
> there are > 1024 cylinders.
> 

In any case, parted can't handle my 80GB Mator IDE HD and kernel/fdisk
work just fine. If you have any patches, I can give them a try. I will
keep my patch if no solution is found soon.


H.J.