Re: 2.6.x partition breakage and dual booting

Patrick J. LoPresti
2004-06-03T14:52:56Z

Frediano Ziglio <freddyz77@tin.it> writes:

> Yes and not... HDIO_GETGEO still exists and report inconsistent
> informations. IMHO should be removed. I know this breaks some
> existing programs however these programs do not actually works
> correctly.

Existing programs work fine if you do something like this first:

echo bios_head:255 > /proc/ide/hda/settings

I know this works because it is how I convince Parted to prep a blank
drive for installing Windows. In fact, it is the only way for me to
communicate the geometry to Parted, as far as I know. (Other tools
usually have command-line switches or "expert" settings to control the
geometry; Parted does not.)

SCSI and RAID devices already return a suitable geometry in
HDIO_GETGEO on all of the systems that I or my users have tried.

So one approach is to leave HDIO_GETGEO alone, and to have a userspace
gadget run early to "fix" the kernel's notion of the geometry. This
would avoid the need to rewrite every partitioning tool.

- Pat