Choosing drive geometry (it's all lies anyway)

[Loïc Grenié]

2011/11/13 Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman at gmail.com>:
> I would appreciate comment on the following:
>
> I don't know the underlying standards and protocols, but it has
> appeared to me for some time that drive controllers lie to you about
> drive geometry, and allow you to manipulate the lies to a certain
> extent.  By that I mean that drives usually present themselves as
> having 63 sectors and 255 heads although a cursory inspection
> indicates, among other things, that those drives actually have exactly
> 1 platter and 2 heads.  It's hard to tell how many sectors, or if
> that's even uniform across the disk surface.

[snip]

    The number of sector/heads/cylinders is a lie. The only thing that
  count is the total number of sectors. You can slice it as you
  like as long as you respect the maximal numbers. Partitions
  need not start or end on a cylinder boundary either (even though
  fdisk will complain).

        You are in a large free world by now,

                Loïc