> > 2) There are no hard disks which do not support CHS translation.  So
> >    for the moment, ignore anything related to such disks.
> According to ATA-4 (when it becomes a standard) disk with greater than
> 16Meg sectors do not have to do CHS.  So its coming.

While it's true that the spec permits it, such disks already exist,
and they *all* support CHS translation -- and most likely always will,
for compatibility with old software.  There's no advantage to not
supporting it, because the firmware was written and debugged years
ago.

(There are other devices that may not support CHS translation in the
future, though; e.g. removable media devices.)

But my main point is that, if you're tailing about the current code
failing on some machine, this *cannot* be relevant, because there are
no existing devices on which it is an issue.  We can worry about the
devices which don't exist after we work on the ones that do.