I have a KG7-RAID with HPT370. Just got a new 120GB disk and plugged it in.. fdisk was seeing a screwy geometry; 16 heads 64 sectors and like 48,000 cylinders. That still only came to about 23MB. I tried moving the 15-head jumper (drive is an IBM 120GXP) but that didn't help. Since there's no facility for changing drive mapping in the Highpoint BIOS, I had just about given up on getting it partitioned under Linux.
Eventually I tried plugging it into the normal VIA IDE controller on the motherboard. That gave a good CHS geometry; 63*255 sec/cyl. Booted into Linux and fdisk'ed the whole 120 gigs. Then plugged it back into the HPT370 -- when I booted Linux again, it saw the right geometry.
Apparently, if a drive has no partition info at all, the HPT370 will just "make up" a geometry -- and not a very smart one. It might also have worked to use fdisk in expert mode to "force" a geometry onto the drive. But if you're not sure what the proper numbers are, just plug the drive into a smart controller and fdisk it. Then the Highpoint chip will use the geometry it finds in the partition table.
Cheers,
Daryl Cantrell
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