From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Jan 7 7:18:56 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CB64937B401 for ; Tue, 7 Jan 2003 07:18:52 -0800 (PST) Received: from web10707.mail.yahoo.com (web10707.mail.yahoo.com [216.136.130.215]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 80E9843EB2 for ; Tue, 7 Jan 2003 07:18:52 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jjramsey_6x9eq42@yahoo.com) Message-ID: <20030107151852.10922.qmail@web10707.mail.yahoo.com> Received: from [66.219.135.59] by web10707.mail.yahoo.com via HTTP; Tue, 07 Jan 2003 07:18:52 PST Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 07:18:52 -0800 (PST) From: "James J. Ramsey" Reply-To: jjramsey@pobox.com Subject: Trying to diagnose/fix/workaround disk geometry problem To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG This may be deja vu if you've been tracking comp.unix.bsd.freebsd. . . . The short version: FreeBSD 4.x is not detecting my hard disk geometry even remotely correctly. It reports a wildly inflated cylinder count. I have tried out several Linux distributions on this hard drive and none of them have had any problem of this sort. The long version: Some horribly long-winded background . . . A few months back, I had tried to install FreeBSD 4.5. The install went rough, and it took several tries to get FreeBSD actually installed. FreeBSD was reading the disk geometry badly, reading some garbage where a cylinder count should have been, and calculating a disk capacity about an order of magnitude higher than what it really was. To finally get a running (or at least walking FreeBSD system), I ended up writing a bogus partition table, containing an entry for a BSD slice the size of my hard drive, and an entry saying that had several gigabytes of unused space behind the BSD slice. Not long after, I decided to nuke my FreeBSD install, and go back to what I was running before. Recently, I wanted to see if FreeBSD 4.7 wouldn't have the ugly disk geometry problems that the 4.5 install did. Someone suggested that I make some FreeBSD boot floppies, boot from them, and see what happens. I could always pull the floppy out and reboot before anything got written to disk. So I did just that, and found out that FreeBSD 4.7 still had the geometry problem. I've been experimenting with the boot floppy install, rerunning the following routine: boot from floppy, see if the cylinder count of the disk geometry is garbage, and rebooting before committing to the install. Somewhere in that routine, I've either twiddled BIOS settings to see if FreeBSD would detect the geometry right, or with fdisk to see if I could manage to write a valid partition table. No luck with the BIOS, and no luck with fdisk. I can tell fdisk what the correct disk geometry is, but I've yet to figure out how to change the partition table entries so that they are consistent with the corrected geometry. Relevant hardware specs: Hard drive: Quantum Fireball, IDE, 20 GB Motherboard: iWill KA266plus, with an ALI15X3 chipset. FYI, the BIOS has not been upgraded, revision is 32402A On to the current problem . . . One of the guys in this newsgroup pointed out that I could look at whatever kernel messages FreeBSD was leaving behind during the install by pressing Scroll Lock and using the Page Up key to scroll up to the messages. I found the following: ad0: hard error reading fsbn 0-3 trying PIO mode ad0: hard error reading fsbn 0-3 status=51 error=04 ad0: 8866663634010175MB [16955114026566160/17/63] at ata0-master PIO4 My hard drive is in reality only 20GB. After getting those error messages, I reran the install and captured the error messages again, but they were slightly different. Here they are: ad0: hard error reading fsbn 0-3 trying PIO mode ad0: hard error reading fsbn 0-3 status=51 error=04 ad0: 4363134873600047MB <}UyN~U}!~IEzA~M~ |M?1>5?!?!~!?!~!?!?!~!> [8343324202738466/17/63] at ata0-master PIO4 Note that the reported hard drive capacity and cylinder count are different than what they were the last time. That's consistent with my experience in installing FreeBSD 4.5. The reported cylinder count was always inflated, but not always the same as before. As I said before, Linux has (and continues to) work fine with my hard drive, so I know there aren't any catastrophic problems with the hard drive. Obviously this does not rule out latent problems. In case this is useful, here are the relevant snippets from *Linux's* dmesg: ALI15X3: chipset revision 196 ALI15X3: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later ide0: BM-DMA at 0xe000-0xe007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA ide1: BM-DMA at 0xe008-0xe00f, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:pio hda: QUANTUM FIREBALLP LM20.5, ATA DISK drive hdb: Pioneer CD-ROM ATAPI Model DR-A04S 0105, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 hda: 40132503 sectors (20548 MB) w/1900KiB Cache, CHS=2498/255/63, (U)DMA ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide Partition check: hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 The disk geometry reported by Linux is consistent with the geometry reported by the BIOS setup. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. 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