Re: [Qemu-devel] qemu-img documentation

[Fabrice Bellard <fabrice@bellard.org>]

Jason Brittain wrote:
> ML wrote:
> 
>> ---
>> Fabrice Bellard said the following on 11/16/2004 02:46 AM:
>>
>>> Try my last fix. The important fix is in 
>>> hw/ide.c:ide_guess_geometry(). I think the problem is that after 
>>> reboot when installing ide_guess_geometry() returns an invalid 
>>> geometry because the BIOS translated geometry is stored in the MBR 
>>> instead of the real hard disk geometry.
>>>
>>> For the desperate user, I added an option to manually specify the 
>>> BIOS translation mode.
>>
>>
>> With this fix now I can boot XP images newly created with 0.6.1 but I 
>> can't boot any longer my older images created with versions < 0.6.1 
>> unless I specify hda geometry on the command line.
> 
> 
> This is going to cause lots of people to not be able to figure out
> how to use qemu anymore after an upgrade.  For example, even if I
> knew that I needed to use the -hdachs option (pronounced "headaches"),
> how would I know what geometry numbers to give it?  I'm not real
> good with this sort of thing, and I haven't found any docs yet that
> try to explain it from the perspective of a VM user.  I know, I know,
> you can't have everything.  But, I do think this will cause users
> repeated hdachs.  :)

I can do the following:

- The default translation will be 'none', so that older images will be 
usable without problems (but not the ones created recently).

- there will be a separate option '-hdatranslation' to change the 
default translation to use 0.6.1 images and to use old OSes such as NT 4.0.

Fabrice.