> 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. Capacity = cylinders x heads x sectors x sector_capacity In your case is it probably : 24000(?)cyl x 16hea x 63(!)sec x 512B(sector capacity) = 12.4GB This is CHS geometry - disk reports geometry 63 sec, 16 hea and appropriate amount cylinders. > Eventually I tried plugging it into the normal VIA IDE controller on the > motherboard. That gave a good CHS geometry; 63*255 sec/cyl. This translations (approximately hea´=hea*16, cyl'=cyl/16) is LBA. Probably it cannot be forced on HPT chip. > 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. Inteligent OS scans partition table and from partiton geometry deduce geometry of whole disk. > Apparently, if a drive has no partition info at all, the HPT370 will just > "make up" a geometry -- and not a very smart one. HPT reports default disk geometry, whereas VIA chip considers BIOS settings (LBA). BUT BOTH GEOMETRY IS RIGHT ! Difference is in maximal capacity addresseable via BIOS routines - limit for address is 1024 cyl. This means, that BIOS can read only from first 528 MB = 504 MiB in CHS mode / from first 8.4 GB = 7.8 GiB in LBA mode. For successful booting OS in this area must be begin of partition (DOS, Win) or whole partition with kernel (linux). But modern mainborads supports extended BIOS call Int13 and allowed exceeding this barrier - and new versons of lilo supports it too :) Whereas CHS metod is embedded in disk on all computers reads it identical, in implementation LBA translating can be difference. I recommended using CHS addressing - on yur computer it will work fine and if you will someday need connect disk on another mainboard, you will give less problems. Miroslav BENES system administrator TENEZ a.s. Czech Republic www.tenez.cz
