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This is not a problem but a question about hdd geometry.
What is actually the Cylinders/Heads/Sectors of a hdd?
I ran fdisk and hdparm on the same disk but they gave me different answers.
Will this affect the performance of the PC? Or even spoil the PC?
And... as you can see, I m multibooting with WinXP, FreeBSD and linux.
Is the geometry standalone on each OS? Or we must use the same values in all OSes?
It's a leftover from early '90s HD, actually nowdays CHS has no reason to exist, since:
1. disks have more than enought built-in logic to handle block indexes and find the place to read themselves
2. disk geometry on modern hds is far too complicated to be described by these 3 numbers
3. CHS can only handle up to 32GB (that's why you get a lower value with hdparam), and if crossed with bioses limits, will make available to bios only 2GB (hence the old booting partition limit)
So is it necessary to change the value of CHS in the BIOS manually or you can just leave the BIOS automatically guess whatever it thinks it is and live happily without worrying about it?
If you have a recent bios you probably won't have any problem. Once the system is booted, the os (at least modern 32bit os like linux or winxp) take care of I/O without ever calling the old 16bit bios interrupts.
My bios is dated 1996, and it's not upgradable, so I have to boot from a small partition at the beginning of the disk, but apart from that my 80GB disk works just fine under linux.
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