>Why not just use the fake disklabel generated for a drive that has
>no label? This seems to give the correct geometry for SCSI drives,
>at least.

It is correct for NetBSD drives.  For drives shared with DOS or other
1024-cylinder limited ``OS'' thingies, it usually fails.

What is needed is a uniform way to gather mapping information about
the drive, and to simply ask the user if that is correct.  The BIOS
has a hint, I suspect.

The problem is that there is no real standard.  However, it seems that
linux has managed to find something that appears to work.  I have
looked at this a little, and it appears to be a simple driver-specific
mapping function.  You get two grometries -- one for physical and one
for warped (er, BIOS?) mapping.

Of course, when people pull stunts like I've done on my drive, this
will fail.  I put DOS low on the disk, in the first 900 or so
cylinders.  NetBSD comes next, with the entire `a' partition below
1024, so the BIOS can read it.  After the BIOS loads the kernel, the
whole disk works, of course.

--Michael

--
Michael Graff <explorer@flame.org>        NetBSD is the way to go!
PGP key on a key-server near you!         Rayshade the world!