General Question

winblowzxp's avatar

How would one go about converting LBA to a CHS value?

Asked by winblowzxp (503points) August 15th, 2008

I just got a bunch of hard drives through my door, and I can get the sizes just fine on some, but on others they have an LBA value.

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6 Answers

Skyrail's avatar

Haha, I found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHS_conversion which seems a little over my head. But this site here states that: “Well this is the only formula which works so don’t go looking for any other way to do this, as an easier doesn’t exist.” So it doesn’t look too easy, but if you can find the right info you’ll just be able to put it into the equation :)

winblowzxp's avatar

I came across those, but they don’t seem to work very well, as the heads/sectors per track aren’t a constant value.

Skyrail's avatar

I don’t think there’s an easier way to do it sorry, only from what I’ve seen of course, I’d never heard of any of this beforehand.

winblowzxp's avatar

I got it. I took a couple of different drives that I had laying around, and applied the formulas to them, one a 20GB and the other a 40GB. They both had the same CHS numbers. So I got a little creative and just multiplied the LBA on the label by the 512 byte per sector, and lo and behold I got my magic HDD size that I’d been looking for.

Skyrail's avatar

It’s good to hear it all worked out in the end :) What are those numbers used for in the end anyway?

winblowzxp's avatar

Basically to describe a location on the hard drive.

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