Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 13:24:42 -0700 From: Mike Smith <msmith@freebsd.org> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: wrong disk geometry reported (fwd) Message-ID: <200005262024.NAA00882@mass.cdrom.com>
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Resend to a more suitable list. ------- Forwarded Message From: "Nikolaus Spence" <nikolaus.spence@corp.freerealtime.com> To: "Mike Smith" <msmith@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: wrong disk geometry reported Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 09:20:45 -0700 I'm running 4.0-RELEASE and have tried BIOS set up as auto-detect, large, normal, and LBA. None of them work. I've been using FreeBSD for almost 5 years on almost a hundred different servers and have never had anything like this. I'm using the /dev/ad1, /dev/rad1 devices. I have used both the command line fdisk, fdisk -i, and sysinstall. I have tried it at initial installation. I tried installing without configuring that drive so I could do it manually and no such luck. In my experience with FreeBSD it doesn't matter what BIOS thinks. The kernel manages to pull the correct info from the disk at boot. Here at freerealtime.com, our developers do most of their work on Linux (ack!). I haven't allowed one Linux machine into our production systems and I'm trying to move our developers onto FreeBSD. So far so good. With this one system I can boot the Linux kernel and Linux will see the drive perfectly. It makes me feel stupid when I just got done explaining how much better FreeBSD is and how I've never had a problem with compatability or reliability. I'm sure that if I purchased the hardware, it would work. But an IDE disk is an IDE disk. Nikolaus - -----Original Message----- From: Mike Smith [mailto:msmith@freebsd.org] Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2000 5:48 PM To: Nikolaus Spence Cc: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: wrong disk geometry reported > I think I may have come across the first non-FreeBSD-compatible IDE disk > drive. The Maxtor 15GB 7200RPM udma/66 drive. > p/n st0151500u Nope. It's compatible. > I am installing it as a second drive and fdisk does not see (or want to > beleive) the disk geometry. The actual disk geometry is 29651/16/63 but It's not; this is just one possible mapping between the drive's actual capacity and the legacy c/h/s interface. > fdisk sees it as a 2GB drive with 2019/16/63. I set the disk geometry in > fdisk and it still won't allow a partition bigger than 2GB. The primary > disk in the system is another Maxtor 15GB drive which works fine. Not the > same geometry but close. It even comes up as 2019/16/63 in the dmesg. I > know the disk isn't bad because DOS/NT/Win98/BIOS sees it's full capacity. > When I just set the disk geometry, create no partitions, and save info, I > can restart fdisk and get 14xxx/7/14 geometry. These numbers are just > strange all together. I figure that an IDE drive is an IDE drive and it's > size may vary but they all work so far for me. You need to be much, much more detailed in your report for anyone to be able to help you here. So far we have no idea which version of FreeBSD you're running, nor which driver you're using, nor how the BIOS is set up, etc. etc. Note also that you might want to use sysinstall to set the drive up to avoid further confusion. - -- \\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith \\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ msmith@cdrom.com ------- End of Forwarded Message -- \\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith \\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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