Large Disk HOWTO
Andries Brouwer,
aeb@cwi.nl
v2.0, 22 January 1999
All about disk geometry and the 1024 cylinder limit for disks.
1.
The problem
2.
Summary
3.
Units and Sizes
3.1 Sectorsize
3.2 Disksize
4.
Disk Access
4.1 BIOS Disk Access and the 1024 cylinder limit
4.2 History of BIOS and IDE limits
5.
Booting
6.
Disk geometry, partitions and `overlap'
7.
Translation and Disk Managers
8.
Kernel disk translation for IDE disks
8.1 EZD
8.2 DM6:DDO
8.3 DM6:AUX
8.4 DM6:MBR
8.5 PTBL
9.
Consequences
10.
Details
10.1 IDE details - the seven geometries
10.2 SCSI details
11.
The Linux IDE 8 GiB limit
11.1 BIOS complications
12.
The Linux 64 GiB limit
13.
Extended and logical partitions
14.
Problem solving
14.1 Problem: Linux invents the wrong geometry for my disk.
14.2 Nonproblem: Identical disks have different geometry?
14.3 Nonproblem: fdisk sees much more room than df?