Date: Thu, 08 Aug 1996 04:45:55 -0500 From: samurai@iosys.net (Rich Bornhofer) To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Disk Geometry. Message-ID: <3209B753.E6E@iosys.net>
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Hello,
I have been trying for about 2 weeks now to get freebsd to install on
my machine, with no luck. I am starting to be convinced that it has
something to do with my disk drive geometry, as by changing the geometry
to various settings (in the fdisk portion of the install) I am able to
get errors to occur at different places, ie, i have been able to access
the bin.aa once, pull up bin.aa, bin.ab, and bin.ac once, and one time,
the installer couldn't find bin.ab... No matter how far i get, all the
files are ultimately corrupt. This leads me to believe that since almost
_every_ file i have downloaded (in binary) has been either in the wrong
gunzip format or failed checksum, that the installer can't seem to get a
'clean' read of the files from my dos partion. Here is what it looks
like :
E-IDE 1.6GIG drive. Fips'ed initialy to have 2 primary dos partitions,
c:drive for dos related stuff (771 MEG) and d: for Windows (95) related
stuff (772 MEG). (I have 2 primary dos partiitions, only c: is bootable)
I then used fips again to cut d: down by 250MEG to allow for Freebsd.
Fips created a 3rd primary drive that i deleted for Freebsd to install
on.
My current Drive geometry as set up in my CMOS is:
786 cylinders, 64 heads, and 63 sectors/track.
This is what i got from MSD with regards to what DOS 6.22 can see:
C: Fixed Disk, CMOS Type 46
392 Cylinders, 64 Heads
512/bytes/sector, 63 Sectors/Track
CMOS Fixed Disk Parameters
786 cynlinders, 64 Heads
63 Sectors/Track
D: Fixed Disk, CMOS Type 0
267 Cylinders, 64 Heads
512/bytes/sector, 63 Sectors/Track
CMOS Fixed Disk Parameters
24783 Cynlinders, 30 Heads
60 Sectors/Track
<note: i have never had any problems accessing files in dos or windows>
When the install probe looks at my disk, it reports :
3145 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors, 512 bytes/track
When i ran the 'pfdisk.exe' program, it reported :
785 cylinders, 64 heads, 63 sectors/track
I have tried 785/63/63, 3145/16/63, and 786/64/63.. None of these
geometries seems to allow the installer to properly read the files i
have downloaded from the ftp.freebsd.org site ( and the last attempt i
made, the files (well the 3 i loaded to see if they could be read) were
from ftp3.freebsd.org.. still couldn't read the files). I am at a
complete loss for what to do to get the installer to be able to read
these files, and i am presuming that even if i were to do the ftp
install (and avoid reading from dos) I would still have problems with
freebsd being able to access it's own files if the geometry isn't set up
for what the disk is expecting. (is that correct?)
Oh, BTW, i am trying to get the 2.1.5R release installed, i don't know
if that makes any difference, but at one point i was able to get Linux
(slackware from cd) to install on this system (at the time i was running
win3.11, but still had this partitioning scheme.. this exact scheme),
perhaps the fact that it came from CD makes a difference, but i will be
trying to install the base distribution from dos later thismorning, as i
am off to download those files to see if it will install.
I am very much wanting to try FreeBSD, and if some guru could delve
into this dilema and offer some helpful insight (other than formatting
the whole thing and making logical drives ;), I would be very much
appriciative.
Thank you for you time in advance,
Savant, the not so knowledgeable ;)
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