Re: [PATCH] IDE disks show invalid geometries in /proc/ide/hd*/geometry

Andre Hedrick
2005-08-03T07:23:08Z

Did you read ATA-1 through ATA-7 to understand all the variations?

On Tue, 2 Aug 2005, Mark Bellon wrote:

> The ATA specification tells large disk drives to return C/H/S data of
> 16383/16/63 regardless of their actual size (other variations on this
> return include 15 heads and/or 4092 cylinders). Unfortunately these CHS
> data confuse the existing IDE code and cause it to report invalid
> geometries in /proc when the disk runs in LBA mode.
>
> The invalid geometries can cause failures in the partitioning tools;
> partitioning may be impossible or illogical size limitations occur. This
> also leads to various forms of human confusion.
>
> I attach a patch that fixes this problem while strongly attempting to
> not break any existing side effects and await any comments.
>
> mark
>
> Signed-off-by: Mark Bellon <mbellon@mvista.com>
>
>