Re: Parted 1.2.14-pre3

[Andrew Clausen]

Matt Wilson wrote:
> 
> The experience I've had with vm86 to do real mode int13 BIOS calls has
> been, well, a bit troublesome.  First of all, the BIOS drive ID (0x80
> for drive 1, 0x81 for drive 2, etc) doesn't map directly to Linux's
> idea of which drive is which.

Could you use the BIOS to read in sectors, and do comparisons with
what Linux reads in?

>  I currently have code to interrogate a
> drive and BIOS to see if the support the EDD BIOS extensions (packet
> mode, to allow LILO to get bits from >1024 cyl).  I've run into many
> BIOSes and adaptors that hook int13 and cause all sorts of problems
> (segfaults inside vm86, mostly).

Ouch.

> I could whip up something in 2 minutes to display the drive geometry
> for a given BIOS drive ID probed by me EDD program if you'd like...
> It's accessible via the same BIOS call that I'm using to int13
> AH=0x48.  See anaconda's source tree in the edd/ directory...

I guess this could be useful... but not something that should go
in the parted distribution (how big would it be?  how big is vm86?)

Andrew Clausen