still cannot control c,h,s with kernel 2.6

["my" <yazdzik@myway.com>]

Dear installer developer friends,
    Deciding that there must be someway to dual boot sid/windows, I tried
the following at boot:

linux26 hd=7296,255,63

and linux26 hda=7296,255,63

Not wishing to have another go round with rewriting the partition table, I
double checked under "show cylinder, head, sector information" in the
partioning section of the installer, and saw the same large numbers as if I
had never used the parameter.  Is this an installer problem or partman
problem?
I would love to solve the wireless firmware issue, but cannot risk losing my
only functioning OS on a mission critical laptop.
There must be a way to force partman to use the chs indices we want it to.
Obviously, laptop owners with prism54 based cards need the 2.6.5 or later
kernel, and most people must dual boot. The parameter change works with fc2,
and should work with the installer - I have tried both sarge test candidate,
and last night's sid_d-i.
I am not sure whether I am a complete idiot, or partman there is just no way
to set teh geometry to a windows compatible system.
If I create an ext3 file system with a different partitioner, can I then
simply install on top of it, as long as it has no OS, that is a partition
with a fs, but no installation?

Thanks, and if the powers that be would like me to refrain from posting
further, I shall. It seems to me, however, that not being able to dual boot
windows on a recent laptop makes the whole new installer rather irrelevant
to owners of such, as otherwise, we could just install the older kernel, and
upgrade.  Rather a lot of work when one should be able to set the parameters
the partition manager uses to be able to use the kernel that matches our
hardware.
Now, the parameters have some effect, as in the shell, neither fdisk nor
cfdisk can open the disk, and parted tells me that the disk geometry has
been set badly by another partitioner.

At some point, one would hope that one could repair this, so as to be able
to generate at the very least an install report.

Very best wishes,
Martin