On Fri, 24 Mar 2000, David Elliott wrote:
> be able to boot onto the 40 GB drive. Can anyone say "open source the
> BIOS code please so we can fix stupid shit like this!" ??
Heh, and then discover you break winbloze. Windows fdisk has
this neat issue that if you disable LBA, it doesn't see more than like
512M or 2G (I can't remember which). However, if you have LBA enabled,
it will end up ignoring what it sees in LBA, but enabling this strange
mode where it can support disks larger than LBA can support. It is
*very* screwball. If you turn off LBA Linux should be able to handle
the entire drive without problem, but winbloze will only see the first
512M or 2G. If you turn on LBA, Linux will only see a certain portion
of the drive due to LBA stupidity.
Now one thing I thought was really interesting was that on a
blank disk the geometry winbloze fdisk placed in the partition table
didn't seem to match the LBA or the non-LBA geometry. I could be
wrong about that, I didn't investigate it very closely, but it did
seem extremely strange.
Of course, the whole problem is that this entire situation is
a hack of a hack of a hack from the old DOS days. I've yet to come
across a drive that wouldn't work under Linux if you disabled LBA. If
DOS had not had stupid limits (and winbloze hacking around those), I
think this problem would have never existed. :)
Stephen
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 31 2000 - 21:00:12 EST