From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Apr 11 09:03:24 1995 Return-Path: questions-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id JAA22183 for questions-outgoing; Tue, 11 Apr 1995 09:03:24 -0700 Received: from wanda.pond.com (wanda.pond.com [198.69.82.2]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id JAA22177 for ; Tue, 11 Apr 1995 09:03:23 -0700 Received: by wanda.pond.com (8.6.9/gw.1.0) id MAA29482; Tue, 11 Apr 1995 12:04:27 -0400 Date: Tue, 11 Apr 1995 12:04:26 -0400 (EDT) From: Glenn McMillen Subject: Re: Installing on large IDE drives To: Pat_Barron@transarc.com cc: questions@FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: questions-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Hi: I have the same setup as you with a Maxtor 7850 AV disk on PCI local bus board with a Pentium 75 MHz processor (Digital Starion 300i). I could not for the life of me, get ANY bsd to install properly. (2.0R and 3/22 snashot) It seems that the 32 value is automagically reverted back to 16 heads. I found the spot in the source code where it happens and it's in the latest part too, so it's still there. Anyways, what I ended up doing was loading up Linux from the latest slackware disks. Which leads me to an observation, bsd and slackware may be free, but the money is going to the blank disk manufacturers ;) Anyways, I really would like o use freebsd instead of linux, but linux works for me and bsd doesn't, so it looks like i use linux for now :( I use suns at work and it would be nice to have the same type of sys admin at home too, but alas, poor Glenn, had to buy the upscale computer, didn't ya! Anyways, unfortunately, try Linux. In response to your last question.... You're hosed!!!! Glenn On Mon, 10 Apr 1995 Pat_Barron@transarc.com wrote: > OK, I feel like a moron for asking this, but I've read the FAQs several > times I'm I'm still not sure. > > I have a Maxtor 7850 AV disk. This is an IDE drive with 1654 cylinders, > which does not do any kind of translation. When I'm installing 2.0R > (using the "newer" floppy images) I can diddle the geometry in FDISK > so that it's recorded as 1023 cylinders (the largest value my BIOS will > accept), but when I tell it "Use entire disk for FreeBSD", it still sets > it up for 1654 cylinders. Anyway, when I try to install like that, all > the newfs's and such work fine, and the install proceeds without incident > to the "remove the floppys now and reboot from the hard disk" point, but > then the boot manager can not load FreeBSD. Which tells me that it's > having a problem with the drive geometry. > > Is there any way I can get this working, getting FreeBSD to use the entire > drive while the BIOS only knows about 1023 cylinders? Am I just completely > hosed? > > Thanks for any advice..... > > --Pat. > #################################################################### Glenn McMillen mcmillen@pond.com Exton, PA 19341