IDE disk geometry not recognised

IDE disk geometry not recognised

Post by Karl-Heinz Herrman » Wed, 26 Nov 1997 04:00:00



Hallo!

I recently put together a "new" box from older parts.  Right now it's
a Weitek 486 EISA Board (unfortunately i have only ISA Components so far)
a  Multi I/O card with 2 serial,parallel,Gameport, Floppy and one IDE-Port.
Main IC on the board: Goldstar Prime 2 9239, Card Number GW2760 [PX]
I don't have the documentation for the IO-Card.

I connected one Western Digital Caviar 1210 IDE-Drive (210M).
This drive has three Jumper positions: Master , Slave and CS (Cable Select?).
To my knowledge it should not be jumpered at all as the only drive on one
IDE-Channel. Is this correct?

The error behavior:

I boot  Linux (2.0.31) from a bootfloppy (dd-copied kernel image).
If I DON'T declare the IDE-drive to the BIOS, the floppy boots, I get
a boot message with the correct CHS=989/12/35 and Linux runs just fine.

If I declare the drive in the Bios-setup (same settings), I can boot from floppy,
but the kernel message at boottime shows a CHS=0/0/0.
After that I can use fdisk, after I specify the disk geometry per expert setup,
but I can't use lilo to write the bootsector. It allways complains:
Device 0x0302: Got bad geometry 0/0/0

I saw the commandline option for lilo (-f) to specify a disk geometry
file but I couldn't find any information on the syntax of this file
(/etc/disktab as default).  I tried to boot DOS (MS-DOS and openDOS)
from floppy, and the Computer hangs (MS) or says Devide Error and
hangs just the same (openDOS).  The drive put in my primary Linux-Box
(usually scsi) boots just fine on an On-board EIDE-Controller of my
Gigabyte Board (detects Mode 1, if somebody can use this info).  I
even restored the MBR with Dos-fdisk and made the drive DOS-bootable
again, but had the same problems in the 486.

To me it looks like the Bios won't give the correct geometry to the
operating Systems. Could this be the case? Has anybody an Idea how to
get this thing workin properly?  Or at least something to try?

I would rather boot from the Harddrive and not have to use a floppy
all the time.

(I tried different jumper-settings on the drive, so the "no jumper" setting works fine
in the other Computer and tried all 8 Jumpers on the I/O-Controller.
Originally they were  all on, and I changed one at a time. They switch the various
I/O-Channels on/off and determine the COM IO-addresses as far as I can tell)

Thank you very much,

Karl-Heinz

--
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Karl-Heinz Herrmann, Stubenlohstr. 25, D-91052 Erlangen

 
 
 

1. linux does not recognize disk geometry

I'm using linux 1.1.45 with a Buslogic SCSI controller BT445S and a 1.2 GB
Quantum SCSI hard disk. According to DOS/BIOS my drive geometry is:
(cyl,hd,sec)=(584,128,32). However, fdisk gives a message that the
number of cylinders is set to 1169. Also I have not been able to install
LILO because of this discrepancy of disk geometry. Is there a way of
telling linux manually the drive geometry?

Can please anybody tell me how to deal with this problem?? Any help would be
appreciated.

Thank's. Werner

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