Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2000 21:34:26 -0700 (MST) From: Jason Seidel <jseidel@rapidnet.com> To: Warren Welch <wwlists@intraceptives.com.au> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: fdisk / disklabel issues... Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.05.10003012129080.70202-100000@rapidnet.com> In-Reply-To: <4.2.1.20000302103756.05601b50@arthur.intraceptives.com.au>
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> Hi all,
>
> I've got a problem with a couple of machines... The first time I saw the
> problem, I thought it was my hardware, but now I've encountered the problem
> on three different systems, all with different motherboards, and hard
> disks. The only think in common, is that with all of them I'm working with
> FreeBSD 3.4, and that all the disks are LARGER than 12Gb IDE's.
This is a commom problem.
>
> One of the things that I notice are that the size of the disk that gets
> reported by the BIOS, and FreeBSD are totally different... As an example,
> the following system reports:-
>
> wdc0: unit 0 (wd0): <ST313021A>
> wd0: 12419MB (25434228 sectors), 25232 cyls, 16 heads, 63 S/T, 512 B/S
>
> from dmesg
>
> yet, when I get the system BIOS to probe the disk, it reports:-
> 24062 cyls
> 16 heads
> 63 sects.
>
> As you can see, FreeBSD recognizes the disk as larger than what it actually
> is. I've found that if I partition the disk using the entire disk (fdisk
> -e wd0), then the last partition on the disk (the one that uses the last
> sectors on the disk) won't be newfs'd...
>
> It's not at all good. sysinstall also seems to have a problem with
> allowing you to set the geometry. I'd expect that if I set the geometry to
> what the BIOS detects, and then say to use the entire disk, that it would
> use that defined geometry. It doesn't... The moment you say to use the
> entire disk, ('A', No), it resets the geometry to something it likes. If I
> calculate the number of sectors manually (to what the bios detects), and
> then create a slice all things work fine within that slice.
Yep.. Seen this happen
>
> I think there is something wrong with the way that FreeBSD is detecting the
> size of the disk. (Interigating the disk that is...) So far I've only had
> this problem with IDE disks.
I have had a machine that the bios picks up the drive as one thing, the
BSD probe picks it up as another, the sysinstall picks that as another.
But the one thing that was weird was that the geometry on the drive said
another size yet.
What you want to do in the sysinstall is pick "A" like you did and choose
to use the entire disk like before. Then after that, you want to set the
geometry according to what it says on the hard drive. If you don't have
that, look it up on the web. This will keep your partition and the new
drive geometry.
Remember, FreeBSD doesn't care what the bios says
>
> Warren
> wwelch@intraceptives.com.au
>
>
>
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>
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