[LI] Debian specific problem

["Nagarjuna G." <nagarjun@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have encountered a peculiar problem on a debian (2.1) system.  The system
has a 9.1 UltraWide SCSI disk (seagate make).  When I do `fdisk' it
shows the following:

studio:/two# fdisk /dev/sdb

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 8683.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdb: 64 heads, 32 sectors, 8683 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot   Start      End   Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1            8     8676  8875912+   f  Win95 Extended (LBA)
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(1023, 254, 63) should be (1023, 63, 32)
/dev/sdb5            8      965   979933+  83  Linux native
/dev/sdb6          965     1083   120456   82  Linux swap
/dev/sdb7         1083     4903  3911796   83  Linux native
/dev/sdb8         4903     8676  3863601   83  Linux native


As you notice the number of cylinders are shown to be 8693, too large to
make lilo work.  Obviously I failed to make the machine boot linux, except
through a boot floppy. Otherwise there are no problems during running.

However, what surprised me was when I tried (on the same harddisk) using
SuSe 6.2, and Redhat 6.0, the out put of fdisk shows entirely different.
They show only 1106 cylinders.  This time lilo also works fine.

I thought the fdisk program is same across different distros.  
Why does this happen?  Any clues?

Nagarjuna

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