Re: Parted 1.2.14-pre3

[Matt Wilson]

The experience I've had with vm86 to do real mode int13 BIOS calls has
been, well, a bit troublesome.  First of all, the BIOS drive ID (0x80
for drive 1, 0x81 for drive 2, etc) doesn't map directly to Linux's
idea of which drive is which.  I currently have code to interrogate a
drive and BIOS to see if the support the EDD BIOS extensions (packet
mode, to allow LILO to get bits from >1024 cyl).  I've run into many
BIOSes and adaptors that hook int13 and cause all sorts of problems
(segfaults inside vm86, mostly).

I could whip up something in 2 minutes to display the drive geometry
for a given BIOS drive ID probed by me EDD program if you'd like...
It's accessible via the same BIOS call that I'm using to int13
AH=0x48.  See anaconda's source tree in the edd/ directory...

Cheers,

Matt

On Sun, Nov 19, 2000 at 08:11:14AM -0200, Andrew Clausen wrote:
> 
> So, the BIOS *always* has "a clue", but sometimes you can't ask it
> (directly) what is thinks the geometry is.
> 
> There are probably BIOS-interrogation programs around...