ADLO and older hard disk support

[Adam Sulmicki]

heh. I just assumed nobody would use those since my assumption was that if
someone does port of LinuxBIOS then they would go with new hardware since
it is where the monnies are :-)

anyway, have a look at loaders.s specifically:

;-----------------------------------------------------
; V) tell BOCHS' BIOS we want to have LBA translation.
; 0x00 - NONE
; 0x01 - LBA    <<<<
; 0x02 - LARGE
; 0x03 - R-CHS
; In future there will be 'fd failover'option in bochs.

mov  al, #0x39 ;; cmos_reg
out  0x70, al
mov  al, #0x01 ;; val (LBA)
out  0x71, al
;-----------------------------------------------------

try puttting different values (other than LBA) into 'AL' and see if it
helps.

On Mon, 12 May 2003, Richard Smith wrote:

> 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.
>
>


-- 
Adam Sulmicki
http://www.eax.com 	The Supreme Headquarters of the 32 bit registers