Hi,

> This is not true anymore. Fdisk used to guess the geometry by looking
> at exisiting partitions, but people got bitten by this a lot during
> installation. Fdisk now uses information extract from the BIOS by
> the bootblocks, and passed on to the kernel. Only if this information
> is not available (if your blootblocks are pre-1.4), it'll fall back
> to the old method you described.

Ok, so fdisk doesn't do this any more.  But does changing the BIOS
geometry in fdisk actually do anything (haven't looked recently)?
I suppose not.  After all, how would you communicate the changed
geometry back to the BIOS?

Note also, that some BIOSs do exactly what I described for our fdisk in
order to deduce the geometry of a disk.  Those happened to hang with our
old method of using the complete disk for NetBSD (i.e. no MBR partitions).

Ciao,
Wolfgang
-- 
ws@TooLs.DE     (Wolfgang Solfrank, TooLs GmbH) 	+49-228-985800