Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 23 Apr 1999 18:06:58 +0200 (MET DST) | From | (Guest section DW) | Subject | Re: Installing Linux on a 20 Gig hard drive with Win95? |
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Because of the 8.4 G limitation, I have to use EZ-Drive to access all 20 G of my new hard drive. My question is is I want to set up one of my partitions for Linux, will it work with the EZ-Drive software? I have 10 2G partitions set up....
The EZ-Drive software does not run when Linux runs so `work with' does not really apply.
Roughly speaking, what EZ-Drive does is using the first 17 sectors of the disk for its own stuff, have a private partition table that is the ordinary one but with the partition ID replaced by 55, and a copy of the original table in sector 1 (counting from 0).
Linux supports this since 1.3.29, that is, there is a flag "remap_0_to_1" in the IDE driver that will redirect access of sector 0 to sector 1. So, yes, roughly speaking you can use an IDE disk that has EZ-Drive on it with Linux.
[Why `roughly speaking'? Depending on the precise kernel version you are using it may be necessary to give command line parameters to make Linux see the entire disk (and not believe the BIOS if that claims the disk to be 8.4 GB). But the routine that does autotranslation stuff does not do anything when an explicit geometry was specified, and that means that the remap_0_to_1 is not done. Without user parameters the kernel invents a translation, but not always the same as was invented by EZ-Drive. There are other, more obscure, flaws in this area. Mail aeb@cwi.nl if you have EZ-Drive problems - probably I have patches. And mail aeb@cwi.nl if you use EZ-Drive and don't have problems - I am collecting information about versions of EZ-Drive and the translations they invent; I am especially interested in translations that do not have 63 sectors/track or do not have 255 heads. I am also interested in the behaviour of EZ-Drive on the first disk when that is a disk that does not require translation.]
Andries
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