From: Mark Lord (mlord@bnr.ca)
Date: 09/16/93


From: mlord@bnr.ca (Mark Lord)
Subject: Re: weird fdisk on slackware bootdisk
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1993 17:28:30 GMT

In article <1993Sep15.160253.17983@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> LeBlanc@mcc.ac.uk writes:
>In article <1993Sep15.131236.2976@bmerh85.bnr.ca> mlord@bnr.ca (Mark Lord) writes:
>>My drive pretends to have 2034 cylinders, and fdisk 1.4 gives repeated
>>warnings about logical.ne.physical parameters for partitions above the
>>invisible 1024cyl "barrier". If I didn't know better (and I do), I'd panic
>>and wonder what to do to use a disk over 1024cyl. Perhaps we should get
>>the maintainer of fdisk1.4 to add a check to remove those warnings for linux
>>native partitions, possibly replacing them by a more sensible "note" about
>>bootable kernel images having to reside within the first 1024cyls.
>
>The problem is that there is no 'standard' way of handling partitions above
>the 1024 cylinder limit in the partition table. Thus any partition
>extending above this limit may possibly be a source of difficulty
>on a machine which adopts a solution different from that adopted in
>the Linux fdisk. Still, I may be able to change the message to
>be more helpful in the next revision.

Thanks.

Perhaps we could have a look at the FDISK from IBM OS/2 2.x, which claims to
be able to handle >1024cyl in some way. That's probably as close to a
"standard" as the PC world is likely to get, or at least as good a model
as anything else might be.

I may give it a try on my own system to see what it thinks of my partitions..

-- 
mlord@bnr.ca    Mark Lord       BNR Ottawa,Canada       613-763-7482