Re: upgrading cmos of compaq 833 cds?
If you are going to use the drive for Linux, tell the CMOS that the drive
has the correct number of heads and sectors, and tell it that there are as
many cylinders as you can up to the actual amount - cmos might not be able
to deal with more than 1024.
If for some reason you can't do that, you can probably tell CMOS almost
anything, and the drive will emulate what you tell CMOS. This is used to
get around the 1024-cylinder limit by increasing the number of heads and
decreasing the cylinders by a corresponding factor - for example you might
be able to double the head count and halve the cylinders. You may then have
to play with the "expert" menu in fdisk to get Linux to treat the drive the
same way BIOS does. You might have to do something similar for LILO, but
since this is the second drive, LILO isn't a problem, you'll have your boot
block on a partition on the first drive.
Disk "geometry" is a fiction these days. Internally, the drives have a
different number of sectors per track depending on whether it's the
inside, middle, or the outside tracks. The drive emulates something with
fixed geometry so that BIOS doesn't get confused.
Bruce
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Bruce Perens K6BP Bruce@Pixar.com 510-215-3502
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