Subject: Re: Disk partitioning (again, sigh)
To: Ken Hornstein <kenh@cmf.nrl.navy.mil>
From: Zdenek Salvet <salvet@ics.muni.cz>
List: port-i386
Date: 07/31/1998 10:05:34
> Alright, even though I've done this a billion times, I guess I'm simply
> an idiot.
>
> Remember that friend's Sony Vaio laptop I was trying to get NetBSD
> installed on? Well, I've got it on there, except the dang thing
> won't boot NetBSD.
>
> Well, that's not quite true ... I can boot of a floppy and tell the boot
> blocks to use wd0a:netbsd, and it works just fine. But when I set
> the NetBSD partition active, or a try to use OS-BS, I get "No operating
> system".
Have you installed the boot blocks ? (/usr/mdec/installboot biosboot.sym)
I guess this is the problem.
> Now, I blew away and re-created the partition a couple of times (don't
> ask), so I _think_ what happened is that I lost track of the original
> translated geometry, and I partitioned the disk with the wrong translated
> geometry, and the C/H/S partition labels don't point to the right
> spot (because I'm using the wrong translated geometry).
Maybe, I think this is not critical for NetBSD boot blocks.
> Now, the question(s) I have are:
>
> - Does my analysis make sense? (One of these days I'm going to understand
> this whole mess completely!)
> - Is there a way to determine the "correct" translated geometry
> associated with an IDE drive? BTW, the BIOS on this machine
> _SAYS_ it's using the "correct" geometry (4000+ cylinders), so
> I'm assuming that gets translated _somewhere_ ... or am I completely
> off-base?
"BIOS _SAYS_" ... you mean setup screen or INT 13 services (pfdisk output) ?
> - Do MBR partitions have to start on a cylinder boundry to work
> correctly?
No, but it's recomended.
> - As I understand it, the crucial limitation is that the BIOS only
> has enough bits for 1023 cylinders, so the other parameters have
> to be made larger so the cylinders can be made smaller. Is that
> right?
Yes.
--
Zdenek Salvet salvet@ics.muni.cz
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