On Thu, Dec 09, 1999 at 10:57:24PM -0700, Brook Milligan wrote:
> Clearly, no one feels like writing unnecessary config entries.  The
> information (which includes more than geometry) needs to come from
> somewhere, though.

Which informations ? How can mformat work then ?

> 
> [...]
> Other potential sources of the geometry information (but not the rest)
> are:
> 
> - the BSD disklabel (this may not exist on all disks needing
>   formating, or is it true that the DIOCGDINFO ioctl(2) will always
>   yield useful geometry information about any raw disk device? is that
>   geometry the BIOS geometry? if not, how is that retrieved?)
> 
> - the MBR partition table (my documentation indicates that the
>   geometry is in fact not encoded there; correct me if I'm wrong)

I'm sure all the infos are here (we tell to tell fdisk the geometry,
and can print it back when re-reading the partition table). 
The table would still be needed for floppies though ...

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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