[TriLUG] Configuring disks under Linux

[Tom Bryan]

I got a bare 40GB IBM Deskstar 60GXP disk today, and I was wondering how to 
make sure that Linux is addressing the disk correctly.  I once had a strange 
problem years ago with another disk where it appeared that fdisk was seeing a 
few more cylinders than the disk actually had.  
              
At boot, I get 
hdb: 80418240 sectors (41174 MB) w/1916KiB Cache, CHS=79780/16/63, UDMA(33)   

Hm...I'll have to figure out why that isn't UDMA(100).  fdisk says

Command (m for help): p
 
Disk /dev/hdb: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 79780 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes

But the label on top of the drive had the following text (among other items)

LBA 80.418.240
CHS 16383/16/63

By the way, this is a second disk on my machine, intended to be used for 
porting an Oracle-based application at work to Linux. :)

---Tom