[syslinux] OT: DOS partition table disk size vs. BSD

[McMahon, Chris]

Hello... 
	I apologize in advance for abusing the mailing list, but you
readers are experts in a friend's problem.  Here is the problem reported
verbatim from a knowledgable reporter, and I wonder if any of you can
shed any light as to what's happening here:

>> The problem appears to be that the DOS partition table is reporting a
>> disk size larger than what BSD intuits when it boots.  This causes
BSD
>> to truncate the size of one of the partitions.  Then <the
application>
>> comes along,
>> reads the DOS partition table and tries to match that up with what
BSD
>> reports.  Since the sizes for the 2nd partition don't match,
>> it declares
>> that it doesn't know what device to use to read the NTFS filesystem.
>>
>> The question is what to do about it.  To do that I need to
>> know why the
>> DOS label reports a larger size.  In the output above, the CHS of
>> 4865x255x63=78156225 sectors, while if you add the start and size of
>> partition 2 from the DOS label you get 80276805 sectors.  The BIOS
>> probably reports something in between, using 16 heads as its basis.
>> 

	This has to do with a fellow Frisbee user-- he seems to have
this problem on all of his machines, but I encountered it on none of
mine.   
	Any light you could shed about DOS partition tables and BSD
partition tables would be welcome.  
	Again, I hope this OT message wasn't too offensive.  
-Chris