On 3/12/21 2:59 PM, Eric Auer wrote:
Hi Jon, actually I do not expect "drivers" like OnTrack, Ez Drive etc. to mess with host protected areas.
It's not OnTrack that I think is messing with the HPA, it's the SATA <-> IDE adapter. Because when I boot from the OnTrack installation floppy, I find that the disk in question shows up with a reported *physical* (not paritioned) size of 130 MB. This is the same size that a Linux Live CD shows for the disk, even though the kernel version on the disk is recent enough that it only pays attention to what the disk tells it and completely ignores reported BIOS values. So I have two software packages (Linux and OnTrack) which are known to ignore the geometry that BIOS gives them and ask the disk directly (that's the entire *point* of OnTrack), and both of which are known to be able to handle disks (much) larger than 130 MB, and both are reporting the same bogus disk size as BIOS is giving (whereas Linux, at least, gives a correct size for the drive with the same adapter on a machine whose hardware and BIOS are about 5 years newer). My conclusion, then, is that some sort of pathological interaction between the BIOS and the adapter is happening that's causing the adapter to set an HPA on the drive, with the result that the drive reports a bogus capacity when Linux/Ontrack gets control of the machine and starts querying the drive for its size, and also refuses I/O to addresses beyond the HPA limit. Most likely, I think is that the adapter is seeing a certain pattern of ATA commands from the drive that indicates to it that the BIOS is having trouble with the size of the drive, and is "helpfully" setting an HPA to cripple the drive down to whatever it thinks the BIOS can handle (which turns out being less than the biggest drive geometry the user can manually set in BIOS, which is in turn less than the biggest geometry the BIOS can auto-detect). _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
