Followup Q to "IBM 120 G IDE -- problems"

[Mark Terribile]

Hi,
     Well, I've got my 120G disk up and running and
now I'd like to understand something odd.

     I went into /stand/sysinstall to put down the
partition and slice tables and the FS and found that
it determined the geometry (cyl/head/sectors) as
15107/255/63 .  Since it warned that the values must
match the BIOS values, I set them to the 59131/16/255
that the BIOS reports.  It rejected this entry and
went back to its own.  I also tried the values
reported
by the ata driver on startup; these too were rejected.

     Since it's working (with about 117G -- that's
Gi_b_abytes) it must be OK (famous last words!) but
what's going on here?  Why does it demand the values
reported by the BIOS if it will refuse them, and why
does the driver come up with another set of values,
also unacceptible to the disklabel/fdisk machinery?

                                     Mark Terribile


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