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Obtaining the geometry

The disk geometry parameters can be obtained by booting MS-DOS and running the program DPARAM.COM with the hexadecimal BIOS code of the drive as its argument, e.g. dparam 0x80" for the first hard disk. It displays the number of sectors per track, the number of heads per cylinder and the number of cylinders. All three numbers are one-based.

Alternatively, the geometry may also be determined by reading the information presented by the ``setup'' section of the ROM-BIOS or by using certain disk utilities under operating systems accessing the disk through the BIOS.



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