> It depends. There are geometry issues that can cause confusion. Things
> like booting booting may be impacted (different BIOS representations of
> geometries of drives causes int13 calls to return incorrect blocks
> during bootstrap, particularly in older BIOSes). Geometry changes also
> tend to cause fdisk to report incorrect partition tables, and tend to
> confuse the admin.
>
> We commonly use larger drives to replace smaller drives in a software
> RAID1 mirror-set when replacing older drives that are out of inventory.
> The difference here is that the software RAID metadevice "hides" the
> BIOS geometry somewhat from the user and bootstrap.
>
> If your image creation takes a snapshot of the drive partitioning, and
> restores it correctly when doing the rebuild, Linux will only see the
> origional partition sizes (potentially with arcane C/H/S issues in
> fdisk, depending on geometry differences due to your BIOS).
>
> With newer BIOSes, LBA32 in lilo/grub, and newer versions of fdisk less
> likely to report geometry errors, I think many of these issues go away.
I thought Linux saw the drives on its own, without input from the BIOS. I had an old packard bell machine that had to have some seagate utility installed over the bootloader because the BIOS wouldn't deal with anything over 2G (when I had win 3.1 or some such on it). At some point, the disk utility got corrupted, but Linux never cared about it one way or the other.
Levi
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked
Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages
posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 19:12:04 EDT