On Wednesday 22 January 2003 10:14 am, Gary Stainburn wrote:
If you look at /proc/ide/hda/geometry, it will show you both the physical and logical geometry of a HD. The physical one can realistically be ignored but the logical one is the one used by the partition managements s/w such as fdisk - compare against fdisk -l /dev/hda.
Sadly I no longer have my old hard disk connected up so I can't look at its gemoetry, however the old disk was a 60Gb IBM drive and the new one is a 120Gb Maxtor, so I guess the likelihood of very different logical geometries is high. Yet after doing the raw copy of the smaller disk, all the tools I have to hand (fdisk, SuSE yast partitioner, win NT disk administator) tell me I have an unused 60Gb block at the end of my disk. This implies to me that dd copied the first 60Gb worth of blocks of the small drive onto the first 60Gb worth of blocks on the second. If I'm wrong about this, then the data on my hard disk is stored very strangely, and I can't believe it would still work. I have one copy of NT on the drive and 3 different linux installations. All seem to work perfectly. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll Confused of Leeds