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Re: SCSI Drive Geometry Question



sbeitzel@touchtmj4.com said:
> I still got an annoying error message from my SCSI BIOS when I boot my
> machine.  I did a low-level format of the drive and all of a sudden it
> was reporting the correct drive geometry of 555/255/63, which is the
> same geometry that my original drive always reported.  After the
> low-level format, I installed Debian again, and when I rebooted for
> the first time after the system installation, I got the error message
> again.  Is the replacement drive damaged or is their some kind of SCSI
> LBA-mode type of addressing that I need to set somewhere?  SCSI
> Devices are not my specialty :) 

Hi!

I had the same "problem".

My IBM drive was reported as 1115/255/63 by the SCSI bios when I first 
installed it, but after Linux was installed I got the same error message as 
you did. I checked what cfdisk said about my drive, and it reported totally 
"wrong" C/H/S information, cant remember the exact figures now. However, you 
can when you start cfdisk pass some parameters to it, namely the Cylinder, 
Heads and Sectors information.

So a 'cfdisk -c 555 -h 255 -s 63 /dev/what-ever-diskdevice-it-is' will 
partition your disk with the right information. When you are about to install 
Debian, just switch to another console before partition your drive, and do it 
yourself with the above commandline. Then proceed as usual. When you use 
cfdisk later, the drive will have the correct geometry, and your scsi bios 
should not complain.

My Tekram SCSI board also has a swith in it's bios to disable the warning.

/Marcus




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