From owner-freebsd-newbies Fri Apr 2 15:54:22 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Received: from ptldpop1.ptld.uswest.net (ptldpop1.ptld.uswest.net [198.36.160.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 1915B14FF1 for ; Fri, 2 Apr 1999 15:54:02 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dpilgrim@uswest.net) Received: (qmail 16741 invoked by alias); 2 Apr 1999 23:53:42 -0000 Delivered-To: fixup-newbies@freebsd.org@fixme Received: (qmail 16703 invoked by uid 0); 2 Apr 1999 23:53:40 -0000 Received: from fdsl89.ptld.uswest.net (HELO uswest.net) (216.161.80.89) by ptldpop1.ptld.uswest.net with SMTP; 2 Apr 1999 23:53:40 -0000 Message-ID: <37055859.E945BB40@uswest.net> Date: Fri, 02 Apr 1999 15:52:57 -0800 From: Darren Pilgrim Organization: Neatly stacked heaps of digital chaos X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: George Halek Cc: newbies@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Disk geometry question. References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org [this should be sent to -questions] George Halek wrote: > > I know I have a disk geometry problem because I get the "Missing Operating > System" message. > > I mucked around with the geometry because I wanted to max. the usage of > the blocks. The geometry which sysinstall assigned wasted about 5M of disk > space. > > I am running a AMI bios 486 with a 1G scsi drive using the Adaptec VESA > 284X controller. > > I tried to max the blocks by using a geometry with 1 head, 63 sectors and > some very high cylinder number. I though this was possible because SCSI > allows you to map the drive however you wish. However this does not seem > to work. > > Even though I am using an ADAPTEC controller which has its own bios. Am I > still contrained by some parameters? > Eg. Boot partition within 1024 cylinders. > 64 sector max. > 17 head max. > or anyting like that? IIRC, unless your 486's main BIOS has a setting for SCSI disks, the entry it has doesn't effect the geometry for the SCSI drives; the SCSI controller takes care of this for you. OTOH, that space loss you see could just be a misscalculation, it happens. Besides, you're only losing 5MB out of 1GB, does it really matter that much to you? -- dpilgrim@uswest.net /\ / __ Our lies are merely the gryph@mindless.com / \/OC/URNE truth of another world ICQ: 29880099 Death is not a kill -9, just a DALnet: anim0s make world and shutdown -r now PGPKey available To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message