[syslinux] BIOS disk geometry and Linux 2.6

[Michael_E_Brown at Dell.com]

Hmm...

Writing to the disk from your bootloader.

I can think of all kinds of situations where we completely screw the system
doing this. You would have to have some kind of very rigorously controlled
environment to have a hope of not messing things up.
--
Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: syslinux-bounces at zytor.com [mailto:syslinux-bounces at zytor.com] On
Behalf Of H. Peter Anvin
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 11:37 AM
To: Patrick J. LoPresti
Cc: syslinux at zytor.com
Subject: Re: [syslinux] BIOS disk geometry and Linux 2.6


I just had a sick idea.  Imagine an MBR which examines the partition 
table using the LBA values in the partition table, fixes them up, and 
then overwrites itself with data taken e.g. from Sector 1.

That way you could create your filesystems under Linux and completely 
ignore the geometry, then they would be fixed up.

Okay, so that won't work.

How about this: a COMBOOT/COM32 program queries for BIOS geometry and 
writes them into Sector 1 of the hard disk together with a signature 
Then you can read them from there.  Again, since you're actually writing 
the data to the disk, the BIOS:Linux drive mapping problem becomes trivial.

	-hpa

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