Molle Bestefich wrote:
Phillip Susi wrote:
Yes, I think this could also be fixed on grub's end. It seems that
fdisk assumes usable default values for the geometry but grub has
different defaults that cause it problems. I think that the defaults
could be modified in grub so that it will work when HDIO_GETGEO fails.
It would be better to make the decision once and for all, in one place.
It would be even better for the HDIO_GETGEO call to return the same
geometry that the BIOS uses, so that Grub is handed numbers that
actually mean *something*.
The numbers don't really mean anything in any case, it's a matter of
choosing one fiction over another. I don't know that there would be any
easy way for the kernel to know which BIOS drive corresponds to the
device, and the device may be one that's not recognized by the BIOS at
all and therefore has no BIOS device (ex: Linux software RAID).
There were problems with this that surfaced sometime after the release
of the 2.6 kernel, where installing Fedora Core 2 on a dual-boot system
with Windows would render Windows unbootable. As I recall, it seems that
even though it doesn't really use CHS, the Windows boot loader somehow
cares that the CHS geometry in the partition table and/or MBR matches
the BIOS reported geometry and chokes if it doesn't. As I see it, the
solution to that would be to not touch the existing geometry if there's
already one there, and if not, then try to find out the BIOS geometry
for the drive somehow and put that in.
--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/
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