IDE & Geometry & Portability of disks between controllers

Recently I moved an IDE disk to another machine and some weird things happened.

LILO booted from RAID and both halves of the RAID mirror were transplanted to the new machine.

1) When booting 'LIL' appeared and then nothing happened for a few seconds, after which the final 'O' appeared, and the system would boot normally.

2) Booting worked but writing to the mirror quickly lead to very bogus 'attempt to access beyond end of device' errors.

Not, this together leads me to the question - should I expect to be able to move an IDE disk from one machine to another and have it function correctly, always?

Thanks for your time.

Regards,

bert

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