bug#22496: why does the parted math look wrong - Q1 ?

Chris Johnson <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.gnu.parted.bugs
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi,

I need some education on how parted is doing math.  ;-)

The drive is 1 TB.

# parted /dev/rdsk/c7t1d0p0
GNU Parted 2.3.0
Using /dev/rdsk/c7t1d0p0
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) unit cyl
unit cyl
(parted) p
p
Model: Generic Ide (ide)
Disk /dev/rdsk/c7t1d0p0: 121601cyl
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
BIOS cylinder,head,sector geometry: 121601,255,63.  Each cylinder is 8225kB.
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start      End        Size       File system  Name  Flags
  1      0cyl       121600cyl  121600cyl               zfs
  9      121600cyl  121601cyl  1cyl

*
Question 1)*

Based on the parted value  8225KB per cylinder,  I would think that 
sectors per cylinder could be calculated thus

     8225 KB/cyl   * 1024 Bytes/KB  = 8422400 Bytes/cyl

and  8422400 Bytes/cyl   / 512 Bytes/sector  = 16450   sectors per cylinder

However, I would also think that sectors per cylinder could be 
calculated thus:
                               
                                                                                               255  * 63  = 16065   sectors per cylinder

Obviously these numbers do not match.

Just for the heck of it, in case when parted says 1 KB it means 1,000 
bytes not 1,024 bytes, I did this math.

     8225 * 1000 = 8225000    / 512 = 16064.4531 sectors per cylinder

which is certainly closer to the value you get from 255 * 63 but it 
really doesn't make any sense to me to be thinking that we are getting a 
fractional number of sectors in a given cylinder.


Thanks for your insight.
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.