[98046] in RedHat Linux List
RE: how do you specify hard drive parameters?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ed Lazor)
Fri Nov 6 11:17:21 1998
From: "Ed Lazor" <elazor@hcs.state.or.us>
To: "William Stearns" <wstearns@pobox.com>, <redhat-list@redhat.com>
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 08:14:01 -0000
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.04.9811052348440.22333-100000@sparrow.websense.net.>
Resent-From: redhat-list@redhat.com
Reply-To: redhat-list@redhat.com
Much relieved. I'll try this tonight when I get home. Thanks for the
information Bill :)
-Ed
Good evening, Ed.
On Thu, 5 Nov 1998, Ed Lazor wrote:
> How do you specify hard drive paramters at the boot: and lilo: prompts?
> I tried the following and nothing seemed to work
>
> > linux hda=16383,16,63
> > vmlinux hda=16363,16,63
> > linux ide1=16383,16,63
>
> Thanks :)
From the BootPrompt-howto at http://sunsite.unc.edu/linux/HOWTO
and /usr/doc/HOWTO/... if you've installed the howto-* rpms:
" ST-506, XT, and IDE disk drive devices. Note that both the IDE and
the generic ST-506 HD driver both accept the `hd=' option."
...
" 5.2. Standard ST-506 Disk Driver Options (`hd=')
The standard disk driver can accept geometry arguments for the disks
similar to the IDE driver. Note however that it only expects three
values (C/H/S) -- any more or any less and it will silently ignore
you. Also, it only accepts `hd=' as an argument, i.e. `hda=', `hdb='
and so on are not valid here. The format is as follows:
______________________________________________________________________
hd=cyls,heads,sects
______________________________________________________________________"
By the way, you're specifying 16383 cylinders, 16 SPT. Are you
aware that you may run into trouble booting if your kernel is completely
or partly outside of the 1024th cylinder? True, you can always get
around it by putting your kernel on a floppy, but...
If it's an option at this point (i.e. you're just in the process
of trying to install and haven't actually partitioned and formatted the
drive) I'd suggest you use 4095 cylinders, 64 heads, and 63 SPT instead in
both the cmos setup and the lilo prompt or lilo.conf. At least that way
your root partition with your kernels can be as large as 1/4 of the drive
before you run a risk of boot problems. Ignore this paragraph if you
already have _any_ partitions on the drive!
Cheers,
- Bill
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unix _is_ user friendly. It's just very selective about who its friends
are. And sometimes even best friends have fights.
William Stearns (wstearns@pobox.com)
Mason, buildkernel, and named2hosts are at: http://www.pobox.com/~wstearns
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