Re: Big IDE drive on old bios

[roman@songdog.eskimo.com (Bill Roman)]

David Frey wrote:
> 
> Paul Christenson writes:
> >On Fri, 15 Nov 1996, Stephen Fuqua wrote:
> >
> >> Will I be able to get lilo to boot off the 1gig drive when I 
> >> make a root partition smaller than 1023 cylinders?
> >
> [...]  You only have to ensure that you
> turn off any translation (put in the true sector/head values) and that the
> boot partition lies < 1023 cylinders.
> After booting linux doesn't need the BIOS anymore.

Basically right, but large IDE disks don't have "true" values for sectors
per track that the BIOS can use.  There are generally different numbers of
sectors on different tracks (there's more room on the outer tracks) and
often too many sectors to address in the measly six bits allowed by the BIOS.

All IDE drives translate internally from fairly arbitrary parameters to
the physical location on the disk.  The host system tells the drive how
many heads and sectors it will use, and the drive's controller does the
appropriate mapping.

I know I've seen a FAQ, HOWTO or mini-HOWTO on this topic, but I can't seem
to find it just now.

-- 
Bill Roman  (roman@songdog.eskimo.com / roman@songdog.uucp)   running linux

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