Disk geometry changed after running linux

[David Balazic <david.balazic@uni-mb.si>]

I encountered a weird problem.

My HW :
MSI K7T Pro2 motherboard ( VIA KT133 chipset ,
 VT82C686A south bridge )
primary master IDE : Quantum Fireball lct20 , ATA-100 , 20 GB
secondary master : Teac CD532E-B

AWARD BIOS settings :
PM : type : AUTO , Access mode : AUTO
SM : type : AUTO , Access mode : AUTO
PS/SS: NONE/NONE

PM disk was set to LBA access mode on each boot.
I had one primary and one logical NTFS partition.


Then I installed linux ( "some" beta version , kernel
is some recent 2.4.0-testXX )

I didn't install any LILO boot sectors , but created a boot-floppy.

After the installation the disk ( win2000 ) would not boot.
It reports :
Read error on disk.
Press ctrl+alt+del to reboot.

If I run linux ( it work OK from the boot floppy ),
it reports the geometry as 3xxxx/??/??.
Thirty thousand and some cylinders , H and S are probably 16/63
( don't have it at hand ).

It should be two thousand something and 255/63, I think.

fdisk -l /dev/hda prints "Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary"
messages for the NTFS partitions ( hda1 and hda5 ). The linux ones are
OK.

The problem is that now the BIOS sets Access mode to LARGE.
I can workaround it by changing access mode in BIOS setup
from AUTO to LBA, but I want to know what made BIOS to default to
LARGE and how to fix it.

-- 
David Balazic
--------------
"Be excellent to each other." - Bill & Ted
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