When trying to install RH 6.1 on IBM Thainkpad 770z with a 13GB harddrive
all that you get is "unable to read" errors from ?(fdisk/diskdruid). It
appers that the stock IDE drivers blow the geometry and report it as
1023,63,16 when it should be 1826,240,63. This prevents installation. A
circumvention appears to be to install to other drive as secondard IDE
device, then upgrade to 2.2.13 kernel (still does not work on large drive),
or 2.3.28 kernel (IDE works well, other things do not compile). When the
2.2.13 kernel is patched with the ide-2.2.13-19991111 patch file the system
then works correctly. It is now able to read the primary drive, and the
msdos, vfat and hpfs file systems that already exist on that drive. The
concern that I have is if the patch that was applied is considered stable,
or am I risking damage to the hpfs and dos partitions that are on the
drive? If there is another way to rebuild this system with a new boot disk
I would appreciate some direction since every kernel that I have built is
too big to fit on a floppy and I am not sure how to rebuild the
installation initrd file. Also it is prety tedious to do a remote install
thru pcmcia to a cdrom on a different box. Any help/ideas/pointers would be
greatly appreciated.

Thanks