DM> Just remember, the LBA and standard geometry are not compatible.

Thats not necessarily true. I just had occasion to prove that
on a 540MB installed in an older motherboard without LBA using
the traditional 1024/16/63 in that motherboard. Installed a new
motherboard with LBA support and you could use either NORMAL or
LBA with all the drive and data etc perfectly fine. Corse the
partition only had the 528MB size that 1024/16/63 produces.

Basically it depends on the mapping from LBA to CHS,
if that doesnt change when LBA is enabled, so the
sequence of sectors doesnt change, it works fine.

The short story is that many drives use the params that it presents to the
bios in an identify request used with the auto identify function of the bios
as the mapping for LBA too. So it still uses the same sectors per track and
heads. That means that enabling the LBA still sees the same sequence of
sectors, down one track, to the max sectors per track, then incrementing the
track number till the max head number, then incrementing the track number,
even in LBA mode, so the sequence of sectors doesnt change as you enable LBA.
@EOT:

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