Re: Why check legacy partition table for non-legacy HDs?

[Andrew Clausen]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2002 at 08:35:41AM -0700, H. J. Lu wrote:
> My questions are what "legacy" is and if it supports cylinders > 1024.

When we're talking about legacy, we're only talking about BIOSes
(and systems that use the BIOS - and perhaps DOS fdisk).

> As far as I know, the "legacy" BIOS doesn't support cylinders > 1024.
> You can't use the "legacy" BIOS with cylinders > 1024.

"Cylinders" isn't a value you have access to.  In fact, we can't ask
the BIOS anything.  All information we get is deduced.

So, while it's true that legacy BIOSes will never have > 1024 cylinders,
there's no reliable way for Linux or Parted to know if the BIOS believes
there are > 1024 cylinders.

Cheers,
Andrew