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Date:      Fri, 18 Oct 1996 09:34:44 +0200 (MET DST)
From:      J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD hackers)
Cc:        kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de (Christoph Kukulies)
Subject:   Re: 2.2-961014-SNAP install problem
Message-ID:  <199610180734.JAA25986@uriah.heep.sax.de>
In-Reply-To: <199610171327.OAA29987@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de> from Christoph Kukulies at "Oct 17, 96 02:27:56 pm"

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As Christoph Kukulies wrote:

> The partition editor barfed at my disk geometry and
> decided to take 2050/64/32 instead of the
> native geometry of 3925/10/107. Trying to enforce
> the latter (G option) doesn't seem possible.

The native geometry of any fairly modern disk is not expressable in
plain C/H/S terms.

If you're using SCSI disks, they are always translated: the SCSI
protocol doesn't know the term `head', `cylinder', or `sector number'
in order to address a block on some storage medium.  All it knows
about is a block number.

We've been repeating this over and over again: the only geometry you
should use is the same as your disk is known to the BIOS.  If your
disk is not used by the BIOS at all, you can pick whatever value you
want, as long as the total number of blocks (C*H*S) on the medium is
not higher than the medium capacity.  In this case, the ``dangerously
dedicated'' mode is the only mode where you can use all the blocks of
the medium (which is normally larger than anything that could be
expressed as a product C*H*S where all the elements are integer
numbers).

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)



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