Fedora Installs and CHS

[Mark Phalan]

Hi,

I recently had a hard disk failure in one of the two machines I have at home. I swapped in the working drive into the second machine as a replacement and installed fedora on it. All went fine. As I wanted to recover some of the data from the failed drive I put it back into the machine. In the process I moved various devices (hd, zip, cdrom, 2nd hd) around on the IDE channels. I had to modify /etc/fstab. All seemed to be working fine.
Then I ran parted on the hardrive (the working one with fedora installed) and this is what it told me:

Using /dev/hdb
Error: The partition table on /dev/hdb is inconsistent.  There are many reasons
why this might be the case.  However, the most likely reason is that Linux
detected the BIOS geometry for /dev/hdb incorrectly.  GNU Parted suspects the
real geometry should be 935/128/63 (not 469/255/63).  You should check with yourBIOS first, as this may not be correct.  You can inform Linux by adding the
parameter hdb=935,128,63 to the command line.  See the LILO or GRUB
documentation for more information.  If you think Parted's suggested geometry iscorrect, you may select Ignore to continue (and fix Linux later).  Otherwise,
select Cancel (and fix Linux and/or the BIOS now).

I have since tried to find out what the correct CHS should be. When the disk was in the first machine the BIOS reported that CHS=7486,16,63 but it seems to be set at CHS=469,255,63 but parted thinks it should be CHS=469,255,63. Fdisk gives this:

Disk /dev/hdb: 3860 MB, 3860398080 bytes
128 heads, 63 sectors/track, 935 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8064 * 512 = 4128768 bytes


The drive in question is a 3.6GB quantum fireball tm3840a. It came with a gateway2000 machine in '96. I know maxtor bought quantum's hard drive section and have scoured their support website to no avail. I CANNOT find CHS information for this drive anywhere on the net.

Is there any way I can determine what the correct CHS should be?
Is it very dangerous to operate using an incorrect CHS?

Thanks,

Mark.