Re: Kernel & BIOS return differing head/sector geometries

[Andries Brouwer]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 05:31:24PM -0700, Frank Cusack wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 24, 2003 at 01:39:08AM +0200, Andries Brouwer wrote:
> > Linux does not use the BIOS, and does not use CHS either, so geometry is
> > totally and completely irrelevant to Linux.
> 
> Is that also true for 2.2?

Yes.

> I've had problems where large drives (60+G)
> do these geometry tricks, and if I don't force the geometry to what I
> want, fdisk (actually, sfdisk, dunno about fdisk) doesn't see the
> entire drive.

Most likely you are talking about a disk soft-clipped by jumper.
Some BIOSes cannot handle disks larger than 32GB, so all larger
disks come with a jumper that makes the disk look like a 32GB disk.
The details depend on the disk manufacturer.
A lot of details can be found in
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/Large-Disk-11.html#ss11.3