[syslinux] BIOS disk geometry and Linux 2.6
H. Peter Anvin
hpa at zytor.com
Fri Feb 27 10:01:33 PST 2004
Patrick J. LoPresti wrote:
>
> This still does not let you do the mapping in general. Any drive
> might have been moved from any machine.
And then you need to install, so you have to make sure this program runs
> Or do you clobber sector 1 on every attached drive? Seems risky...
That's the idea.
> And don't some boot loaders use sector 1?
None that I know of. I know someone on this list (Murali?) is
successfully using it for some installation stuff.
> Just out of curiosity, why is it such a bad idea to pass the geometry
> as a kernel parameter?
It just doesn't buy you anything.
> I suppose it might be better just to add a field to the EDD data and
> fill it in from setup.S... Hm.
I believe this is the right thing to do.
> I still think the geometry issue and the device mapping issue are
> completely independent and need to be solved separately.
>
> The geometry issue is critical for me, and it can be solved without
> any scribbling on the disk just by asking the BIOS a few questions.
>
> The device mapping issue is harder, but on the other hand it is about
> 1000 times less important. Almost all of my users only have one
> drive; for the rest, I am happy to tell them "use a newer BIOS or
> choose the boot device manually". And even without EDD 3, I can take
> a pretty good guess at the boot device.
Well, what you should do, then, is ask the EDD patch authors to make the
data available even if it's incomplete.
-hpa
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