Re: hard drive

[David Wright <d.wright@open.ac.uk>]

Quoting Rick Knebel (rknebel@rknebel.csrlink.net):
> When I boot up redhat I have a 3rd hard dirve which is a seagate UDMA
> Seagate 3.2 gig that gives me unusual partition info as compared to my
> other 2 hard drives .
> 
> It says: " hde: [PTBL] [787/128/63] hde1 hde2"
> 
> All my other hard drives just have the drive and partition designation
> without the PTBL and extra numbers.

I had a 1GB disk that used to do this, and its twin in another machine
didn't. The difference was that the former had been formatted in a
486DX66 with a BIOS that supported LBA etc. and then later put back into
the old 486DX33 again. I had to add the linear option to lilo.conf
before it would boot.

Recently I installed hamm onto it from scratch, so I took the opportunity
of repartitioning and reformatting the disk for DOS (and doing fdisk /mbr
to get rid of lilo). That got rid of the "problem" (or difference).

It used to say
 hda: [PTBL] [523/64/63] hda1 hda2 < hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 >
now it says
 hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4
and fdisk reports
Disk /dev/hda: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 2093 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes

I also recollect that ataprobe (by PAP den Haan) had "block mode default"
in its output. Otherwise, the output for the two disks differed only
in their serial number.

So what appears to be happening is that there's some sort of geometry
conversion going on which linux is reporting on.

Cheers,

-- 
Email:  d.wright@open.ac.uk   Tel: +44 1908 653 739  Fax: +44 1908 655 151
Snail:  David Wright, Earth Science Dept., Milton Keynes, England, MK7 6AA
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