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[PLUG] Pass drive geometry on boot - CHS or HCS?
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Unfortunately I needed to put RH8 on my laptop alongside Win98. I had
RH7.2 existing peacefully for months. Upon installing 8 (NOT upgrading)
I was unable to boot into Linux...it hung at identifying the harddrive.
It kept reporting "hda: Checking Partition". After forever it would time
out and complain about no root file system being available. The only way
to get through the boot process was to pass the drive geometry at the
boot prompt. I have a Dell latitude ls laptop with very few options in
the BIOS, I mention this because the BIOS is apparently reporting
numbers the kernel doesn't like and I don't see any options to change
this...no option to enable or disable LBA. Here's the question...
I was passing in hda=255,63,2432 and it worked. This was an accident, I
read the HOWTO page wrong...
all documentation I see says it should be hda=2432,255,63 and that
didn't work!
What worked was Heads,Sectors,Cylinders and not C,H,S. Does this even
matter if everything multiplies out to the correct number in the end?
Am I corrupting data by leaving this? It seems to be the only way it
will boot at the moment...I recompiled my kernel once already since I
read that the PIIX4 chipset support was a little buggy but the default
PCI drivers didn't fair any better. I think I'm going to recompile a few
more kernels and slowly disable things (from the RH default) that I can
figure out to be a source of the trouble. Is that a waste of time or
should I just accept that passing in the drive geometry is how it's
going to be? I'm more curious then anything at this point. Ok, maybe
a bit frustrated too.
Once I'm done with RH8 in a few months I'm switching to Debian.
I didn't include any dmesg, fdisk or hdparm output to save space. If
necessary I can provide.
Thanks.
Jason Wertz
Senior Technology Specialist / WebMaster
Delaware County Community College
ph: 610-325-2771
fax: 610-325-2820
http://learn.dccc.edu/~jason
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