[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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