[syslinux] Question on docs
H. Peter Anvin
hpa at zytor.com
Thu Oct 3 12:27:18 PDT 2002
Emilio Recio wrote:
> H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
>> We're talking about non-floppy devices all of a sudden. Here there be
>> dragons.
>>
>> Does your BIOS treat this device as a floppy or as a hard disk? If it
>> treats it as a floppy, you *must* have the correct CHS geometry when
>> you create the filesystem, or the resulting disk image will not work.
>> It is probably impossible for Linux to guess what your BIOS will pick
>> as the CHS geometry.
>
>
> You're funny! :) Yeah, i tried to sneak the question in so that I
> wouldn't get static. The bios has it reporting as "Booting from USB
> FDD". But like i said the nexdisk usb flash "drive" works great, but the
> others fail miserably (64MB). How do I find out the drive's CHS? The
> 128MB flash drive is something like 1024 cylinders (or at least that's
> what linux's fdisk thinks.)
>
Your best bet would be to format the drive under DOS, I suspect.
Unfortunately there is no really good way to find out what the BIOS
thinks the geometry of a floppy disk is... at least, not
nondestructively. One could write a program to discover it destructively.
-hpa
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