Hard Drive Geometry

Gregory J. Neumann gjn at certainlywood.com
Wed Apr 10 10:25:14 EDT 2002


Do you remember what the complaint was?  I often get an error on how the cylinders 
are over 1024 and some OS's &/or boot loaders will be confused.  Linux will query 
the dirve directly and ignore what the motherboard thinks, this is what fdisk will 
do.  If you're only running Linux off that HD, you can go that route, but M$ OS's 
will NOT be able to access the drive at best, at worst, they'll try to "fix the 
problem" and fry your Linux install.
Check for a BIOS upgrade, if there is one, it's usually got more goodies than just 
the updated hard drive stuff.  Make sure you have a DOS bootable floppy.  I don't 
know why, but that's what 90% of the x86 motherboards want for the flash utilities. 
 It's usually pretty simple, get the file, unzip it on the bootable floppy, run the 
program and don't turn off the power (read: keep small, curious children FAR 
away!!) while it's working.  I format the floppy 2 or 3 times just to be sure.  
Should've gone SCSI ... right Bob?? ;-)

-Greg

> I added a 2nd bigger 6gb hard drive on my computer to set up a dual boot
> with Redhat 7.1 and Windows 2000 server which I have done in the past
> with no problems.  When I went to install Linux and it came to the
> partitioning it came up with an error about the geometry of the
> cylinders on the hard drive. Does anyone know how to change that and why
> does it do that? 




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