Re: Disk Geometries reported incorrectly on 2.6.0-testX

[davidsen@tmr.com (bill davidsen)]

In article <20031203232726.GC466@gnu.org>,
Andrew Clausen  <clausen@gnu.org> wrote:
| On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 02:07:06PM +0100, Szakacsits Szabolcs wrote:
| > > Can you elaborate?  Autodetect what?  Autodetect if the BIOS supports LBA?
| > 
| > Autodetect to boot from the boot controller's miniport driver or using
| > BIOS. It should have been mentioned in one of the Microsoft articles I
| > referred.
| 
| I'm totally confused.
| 
| What's a miniport driver?  What is a boot controller?  Do these have
| anything to do with LBA?
| 
| Also, you say "autodetect"... you mean it is making a decision to use
| some method (not that I understand this).  How does it make the decision?
| 
| The article doesn't mention "Linear", "LBA", "boot controller" or
| "miniport driver" at all.  (I was looking at
| http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=98080 - is this the right one?)
| 
| 
| The question I believe I asked was: how does the Windows installation
| software decide whether to use LBA or CHS?  Is this an answer to
| this question?

Some (most?) BIOS implementations let you set this as an option,
something like STANDARD, LARGE and LBA choices. Most today set LBA
unless you force it.

I would expect the Windows installer to use what the BIOS provides, but
I'm happy to say I haven't done a winstall in several years.
-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.