All About Disk Geometry and The 1024 Cylinder Limit For Disks.
Large Disk mini-HOWTO
Andries Brouwer, aeb@cwi.nl
v1.0, 960626
1. The problem
Suppose you have a disk with more than 1024 cylinders. Suppose moreover that
you have an operating system that uses the BIOS. Then you have a problem,
because the usual INT13 BIOS interface to disk I/O uses a 10-bit field for the
cylinder on which the I/O is done, so that cylinders 1024 and past are
inaccessible.
Fortunately, Linux does not use the BIOS, so there is no problem.
Well, except for two things:
(1) When you boot your system, Linux isn't running yet and cannot save you from
BIOS problems.This has some consequences for LILO and similar boot loaders.
(2) It is necessary for all operating systems that use one disk to agree on
where the partitions are.In other words, if you use both Linux and, say, DOS on
one disk, then both must interpret the partition table in the same way.This has
some consequences for the Linux......
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