Re: [RFC] Restoring HDIO_GETGEO semantics (was: Re: workaround for BIOS / CHS stuff)

Patrick J. LoPresti
2004-07-03T13:59:40Z

Andries Brouwer <Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl> writes:

> (ii) Various people talk about moving disks between machines.
> Such people have not understood the main fact here:
> the geometry is not a property of the disk but of the BIOS.

Um... Yes, right, exactly, very good. So you *must* obtain the
geometry from the BIOS and not from anything you happen to find on the
disk. Which is sort of my entire point.

> It is futile to hope for a construction that will work across
> different machines with different BIOSes.

Simply false. "modprobe edd.o" followed by an examination of the
fields under /sys/firmware/edd will give you precisely the right
values.

- Pat