VOGONS


First post, by Pabloz

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old motherboards come with the combination CHS that is cylinder , sector , head. In some of those motherboards you have to manually put the numbers on the bios.
and after that you can book and fdisk the drive.

i was unable to find information online on how to obtain the Cylinder/Head/Sector of an specific compact flash card.

so if you buy a 256mb or 128mb CF card, how can you obtain the Cylinder/Head/Sector numbers that you need to input in the bios?

Reply 2 of 10, by konc

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Run the attached utility on the machine you have the CF connected. Define nothing in BIOS, boot from a floppy and run it.

Filename
IDEINFO.zip
File size
3.83 KiB
Downloads
2483 downloads
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

I'm assuming that your question is about machines that don't have an auto-detect option in BIOS. In this case using the auto-detect feature of another machine to get the values is dangerous, unless you are absolutely certain what you're getting. Usually, not always of course, PCs with auto-detect also have LBA.

Reply 4 of 10, by konc

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starquake wrote:

Could you explain how it could be dangerous when copy pasting CHS values? Would like to know.

Nothing will explode 🤣 Auto-detecting a card on a PC supporting LARGE/LBA might give you wrong values for a pure CHS-capable BIOS. To be honest smaller cards mostly come out correct, but larger and newer CFs sometimes return very weird geometry, nothing like a mechanical disk. There's no problem with this approach, you just need to understand what values you're getting and if they make any sense. I mean you may end up with values that are even outside the range of what you can enter on a CHS-only BIOS.

Reply 6 of 10, by kixs

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If your BIOS supports LBA, then I'm almost certain that it has HDD auto detect. Just use it. With CF larger then 1GB use LBA, otherwise use CHS.

Requests are also possible... /msg kixs

Reply 7 of 10, by starquake

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I was talking about the same scenario that the OP was talking about. Using autodetected CHS values for a machine that does not do autodetection.

In other words: I'm safe using the autodetected CHS values (not LBA or LARGE) in a machine that does not have autodetection, right?

EDIT: OP was not talking about doing that. Disregard that statement.

Reply 8 of 10, by konc

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starquake wrote:

In other words: I'm safe using the autodetected CHS values (not LBA or LARGE) in a machine that does not have autodetection, right?

Yes, that's what I meant by "understand what you're doing". If you can do an auto-detect and force CHS, of course go ahead and do it, it's all good. Not all BIOS however allow you to choose mode (CHS/LARGE/LBA) when using auto-detect, that's why I made that comment -but obviously didn't explain it enough.

@kixs: starquake is not the OP 😉

Reply 9 of 10, by root42

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Wow, thanks! The IDEINFO.EXE worked! I had been struggling to get the geometry for a 256MB card. Since I don't have a regular PC anymore, this was the only way on my 286. 😀

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