[vox-tech] bad partition table

[Nick Schmalenberger]

Some more information about my problem is that hdparm insists that the
geometry of this bad disk is 838 cylinders, 240 heads, and 63 sectors
per track. In the machine this drive was in when the problem started,
the BIOS was set to autodetect all IDE parameters. When I go in the BIOS
now and use the tool to automatically detect once parameters of disks
and put them in table, so as not to autodetect again every boot, it
gives me three options for normal, LBA, and large address modes. Large
mode uses the same parameters I said above that "hdparm -g" gives.
"hdparm -i" says that there are 13410 cylinders, 15 heads, and 63
sectors per track, and this is also what the drives label says. This is
also what the BIOS detects for normal address mode. But if I manually
put that into the BIOS, hdparm still says 838 cylinders and so on. All
of yesterday, I thought the problem was just with the geometry setting,
and by playing around with that, I think I was able to get hdparm to say
the right thing but not anymore. When I redid the root partition with
fdisk, it was large mode because that was what was autodetected and I
figured since it was autodetect before and when the problem started,
maybe it should be if I want to fix it too. When I put this drive in one
of my other machines, that also happens to have a disk of nearly the
same model and exactly the same geometry, the bad disk is, before and
after fdisking, autodetected with large address mode. But the other disk
is autodetected in normal mode and hdparm reads 13410 cylinders. So
somehow this one bad disk doesn't want to be addressed in normal mode or
something. The whole geometry issue just confuses me. When I recreated
the root partition while the bios had the disk in large address
translation mode, did that put "large address translation mode" in
wherever "hdparm -g" gets its information from? I wish I could just be
in normal mode since apparently linux doesn't need any of the
translation modes anyway. Did I just dig my hole deeper by recreating
the root partition when the disk was in large address mode?