Re: OS2: LINUX: Warp + Linux + 810MB drive

[Keith Moore <moore@CS.UTK.EDU>]

Apparently (through some mechanism I don't fully understand) IDE
drives can pretend that they have a different disk geometry (# of
cylinders, # of heads, and # sectors/track) than they actually do.
This has been used for a long time to get around the limitation of
1024 cylinders and/or 16 heads in some DOS or BIOS data structures.

My understanding is that if you are using several different operating
systems on one disk, you have to use the same disk geometry for each
of the operating systems.  You can't tell one OS that it has 16 heads
and another one that it has 32 heads, because then the disk partition
table (which marks partition offsets in terms of cylinders, sectors,
and heads rather than absolute sectors) will be wrong for one or the
other.

So if Linux can't deal with > 16 heads, you have to somehow
reformat/reconfigure the disk to make it look like it has fewer heads,
and then start all over with the installation, making sure that both
OS/2 and Linux see the same geometry.  If Linux doesn't read the new
disk geometry correctly, you may be able to fool it by telling LILO
what the new geometry is.

Good luck

Keith Moore