"Heiko W.Rupp" <hwr@pilhuhn.de> writes:

> adaptec, get the size from the mode-sense, see if it is larger or
> smaller than 1GB and calculate the number of Cylinders with one of the
> two adaptec translations. THen prompt the user that she has to enable 
> the extended translation of the adaptec for drives > 1? GB and skip
> the "ask the user for geometry" thing totally.

It's amazing how slippery this whole thing is.  You can at best be
right only 95% of the time.  So there is no reason that you can not
set up your machine with > 1G translation (H/S 255/63) and use a smaller
disk.  And there is no reason that you can not put a large disk in 
and use the < 1G translation (H/S 64/32) as long as you remember that
the root partition had better fit in the first Gig of the disk.

PS
You really don't want to tell the user to play with the extended
translation mechanism, if they were not smart enought to set it on
to begin with.  If you have other OS on the disk, this could be a 
really bad idea.