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Disk geometry

 

For floppies and most hard disks, LILO can obtain the disk geometry information from the kernel. Unfortunately, there are some exotic disks or adapters which may either not supply this information or which may even return incorrect information.

If no geometry information is available, LILO reports either the error
geo_query_dev HDIO_GETGEO (dev 0x number)
or
Device 0x number: Got bad geometry sec/ hd/ cyl

If incorrect information is returned, booting may fail in several ways, typically with a partial ``LILO'' banner message. In this document, that is called a ``geometry mismatch''.

The next step should be to attempt setting the linear configuration variable or the -l command-line option. If this doesn't help, the entire disk geometry has to be specified explicitly. Note that linear doesn't always work with floppy disks.





Ross Biro
Sat May 20 13:51:22 PDT 1995