From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Jun 16 14:15:42 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id OAA19818 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 16 Jun 1995 14:15:42 -0700 Received: from sass165.sandia.gov (sass165.sandia.gov [132.175.109.1]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id OAA19812 for ; Fri, 16 Jun 1995 14:15:40 -0700 Received: from sargon.mdl.sandia.gov (sargon.mdl.sandia.gov [134.253.20.128]) by sass165.sandia.gov (8.6.11/8.6.12) with ESMTP id PAA26999 for ; Fri, 16 Jun 1995 15:22:18 -0600 Received: (aflundi@localhost) by sargon.mdl.sandia.gov (8.6.10) id PAA17715 for freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org; Fri, 16 Jun 1995 15:15:34 -0600 Message-Id: <199506162115.PAA17715@sargon.mdl.sandia.gov> From: aflundi@sandia.gov (Alan F Lundin) Date: Fri, 16 Jun 1995 15:15:34 -0600 In-Reply-To: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) "Re: HD Geometry dirty trick" (Jun 16, 3:01pm) X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.4 2/2/92) To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: HD Geometry dirty trick Sender: hackers-owner@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk On Jun 16, 3:01pm, Terry Lambert wrote: > Subject: Re: HD Geometry dirty trick > > > Does this mean that it's possible that every distinct > > BIOS could produce a different geometry for a given disk > > drive, so that there is no way to predict via an algorithm > > for all machines what the BIOS geometry should be? Bummer! > > Yes. Generally, it's on a per controller ROM revision basis, and > is not specific to internal machine BIOS. It gets the general name > of "BIOS" because the POST routines on the card point the INT 13 > interface to their own ROMs, replacing/chaining the default BIOS. > > And there's no way to ask... there's a way to figure it out that mostly > works, but which can run into LCF problems. If there's no way to ask, how does DOS do it? Or does DOS just ask the BIOS to do it? --alan