Disk Addressing and Geometry

A Disk Address is a combination of head-cylinder-sector values.

The number of heads, cylinders (or tracks) and sectors is known as the Disk Geometry

Your BIOS may not be able to handle disk geometries larger than some value (of head, cylinders, sectors, or the combination).

Disk manufacturers and software vendors have come up with clever schemes that permit the disk subsytem to "fool" the BIOS by making the disk appear to have a different geometry.

Linux generally does not use any of these schemes, but it can be fooled as well. Modern BIOS systems have an autodetect and/or a user-defined option for disk configuration.

The true geometry of the disks in the machine we're looking at is:

assuming 512 bytes per sector