ADLO and older hard disk support

Richard Smith rsmith at bitworks.com
Mon May 12 17:37:00 CEST 2003


ADLO appears to choke on older harddrives.

We have a box of bunch of < 512 Meg harddrives that we use for systems 
where we want a little more space than a  8 or 32 Meg CF to develop on. 
  I wanted to use one to boot a different Linux install than the one I'm 
booting now.

I tried about 6 or 7 different drives from different Mfgs and they all 
had a similar issue.  ADLO would find the drive get a PCHS value and 
what sometimes looked like a resonable LCHS values.  But the drive size 
would be 0 Meg.  Then the int13 handler would barf about things being 
out of range.  Usually 2 out of the 3 CHS values reported by int13 would 
be zero.

Perhpas a LBA problem?  Is the current HD stuff only good for say like 
drives that can do LBA32?  Anyone else ran into this?

This is mostly just a FYI for the archives as I'll just go cobble up 
another newer drive and move on.

-- 
Richard A. Smith
rsmith at bitworks.com





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