All About Disk Geometry And The 1024 Cylinder Limit For Disks.
Beginning of paper
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-b ....
Middle of paper
.... all relevant details.Note that I used
kernel version 2.0.8 source as a reference.Other versions may differ a bit.
2.Booting
When the system is booted, the BIOS reads sector 0 (known as the MBR - the
Master Boot Record) from the first disk (or from floppy), and jumps to the code
found there - usually some bootstrap loader.These small bootstrap programs found
there typically have no own disk drivers and use BIOS services.This means that a
Linux kernel can only be booted when it is entirely loc ....
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