Re: [PATCH] fix HDIO_GETGEO ioctl for linux

[Szakacsits Szabolcs]

On Wen, 16 Nov 2005, Andres Salomon wrote:

> I ran into a problem when running parted on Ubuntu Breezy with an sx8
> device; it would SIGFPE upon startup.  The culprit, it turns out, is the
> HDIO_GETGEO ioctl; 

This is very interesting. HDIO_GETGEO is completely useless for
partitioning and it was supposed to be removed over a year ago.

If for some reason its wrong values end up to be used then that could
explain why people are still corrupting their partition tables.

        Szaka

> when asking for geometry information about a partition (the name-based
> probing wasn't working well for devices like /dev/sx8/0p1, etc),
> sectors and/or heads was 0.  This patch makes parted to not only check
> if the ioctl didn't fail, but also make sure it returned sane results
> (both are unsigned, so we don't have to worry about <0).
>