Fix for the XP dual boot problem

[Radu Cornea]

shmuel siegel wrote:

> results seem a little bit worse. There is an added message that says
> that the system thinks that I have 16 heads. And, BTW, partition magic
> says that the geometry changed from 255 heads to 16 heads.
> 

Same thing happened to me. The installer changed the head count for hda 
from 240 (that was initially for my hard disk) to 16, making the XP 
unbootable. I fixed it by changing the head count back to 240.
I would say Partition Magic is right on this one. Even on the systems 
not affected by the bug, the 2.6 kernel reports strange values for the 
disk geometry. The message you are getting may be due to that.

These are examples from FC2:
$ more /proc/ide/hda/geometry
physical     16383/16/63
logical      19841/16/63

On another FC2 machine:
$ more /proc/ide/hda/geometry
physical     16383/16/63
logical      16383/255/63

On a FC1 machine (2.4 kernel) the numbers are ok:
$ more /proc/ide/hda/geometry
physical     155009/16/63
logical      9726/255/63

The product C*H*S should be the same (or close at least)...