> Greetings and Consternations!

Y'know, I feel like continuing this conversation just to see what
inventive words you'll come up with next for that signon line. :-)

>> der mouse meowed:

...or verbs for me. :-)

> Again, puny on a big disk but it can be significant on a 200M drive,

200M drives tend not to have thousands of cylinders. :-)

> In the ATA world, the number of cylinders can be increased to 64K.

...though in the inhell 386 world, it can seem like it. :-(

> I think the problem stems from the fact that you can probe an IDE's
> *native* geometry as well as [its] *current* geometry
[and NetBSD is apparently a little careless if the BIOS has set them
different]

>> (newfs has options to override the label's geometry info; if you use
>> enough of them, the label's geometry _is_ ignored.)
> OK.  So, even when "ignoring" the geometry, it is effectively using
> command line options to imply a *new* geometry...

Yes - for purposes of that filesystem only.

>>> But, if CHS addressing is used, then the geometry is significant.
>> True.  But I don't know which geometry it is that matters; I'm
>> inclined to doubt it's the disklabel geometry, but [dunno].
> I am assuming that the system takes the geometry out of the disk
> label and not (?) from the controller?

As I said, I don't know.  I would _expect_ it to use the geometry it
found at drive probe time, but haven't looked.

> Of course, a better solution might be to just not support i386??  :>

The more I see of the BIOS IDE geometry hell compatability with past
mistakes requires, the saner this option looks. :-(

Perhaps fortunately, I'm not i386 portmaster. :-)

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