From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Christopher Faylor <cgf@redhat.com>
To: Jason Molenda <jason@molenda.com>
Cc: overseers@sources.redhat.com
Subject: Re: hard disk fun == down time
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 22:14:00 -0000
Message-ID: <20010330011516.B11378@redhat.com>
References: <20010329212736.A9776@redhat.com> <20010329203236.A2834@shell17.ba.best.com> <20010329210551.A8694@shell17.ba.best.com>
X-SW-Source: 2001-q1/msg00524.html
Message-ID: <20010329221400.UeZ5uaoF7v-qcwaKlDuA69d69JyH1BR7ELT2YcIYOOk@z>

On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 09:05:51PM -0800, Jason Molenda wrote:
>On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 09:27:37PM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>
>> The end result was that when I wrote to /dev/hda4, I was also randomly
>> writing to /dev/hda3.
>
>I was just talking with Marc Rovner on the phone and mentioned the
>problem.  He suggested that some old BIOSes had kooky confusion
>about larger hard drives, and if Linux didn't know that the BIOS
>might report incorrect information, hilarity could ensue.  Marc
>said the trick was to specify explicitly the size of the drive
>(cylinders, sectors, etc.) in Linux and everything would be OK.
>
>FWIW.

Could be, but this happened to me with a BIOS from December 2000.
No amount of BIOS fiddling seemed to help.

cgf