> Naive thought: wouldn't it be possible to check whether a partition > overlaps the HPA boundary and warn or even bug out in that case? No - believe me we all thought about that. The PC partition format has starts but not ends so you need detailed internal file system knowledge to play guessing games (which thus needs to be user space). Some of the non PC formats use the middle or end of disk so if you don't know the size you can't *find* the partition data. Alan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html