Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2005 22:12:01 +0100 From: Christian Wurst <christian.wurst@gmail.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Problems with 170MB HD (FreeBSD 6.0) Message-ID: <370076f10512041312u27835972n806937f4e710534e@mail.gmail.com>
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Hello, I've been trying to install FreeBSD 6.0 on an old Pentium MMX 200MHz this weekend. The box has two HDs, a ~10GB one, which I wanted to use for / and a really old ~170MB one, which I wanted to use for swap. (Of couse there would be enough space on the first disk for swap, but I had this old disk lying around here and thought why not use it.) I booted up from CD and started creating slices on the HDs, which worked perfectly for the primary master HD (the 10GB one). But sysinstall complained about an incorrect geometry setting for the 170MB drive and asked me to enter them manually. I didn't want to reboot to get the BIOS values and tried to finish the install without swap at all - which worked. I rebooted, got the geometry settings for the disk from the BIOS, started sysinstall and enterered them in fdisk using the (g)eometry command. The detected geometry is 18863 cyls/255 heads/63 sectors, which adds up to a 144GB disk according to fdisk. After I enter the correct values (903 cyls/8 heads/46 sectors), it tells me, the disk has 162MB, but still shows me 144GB unused space. If I now use the a-command to use the whole disk, it assignes the 144GB to ad1s1. That seems really odd to me, I'd expect it to create a 162MB slice only. If I (w)rite the changes, it tells me the partition was created sucessfully and ad1s1 shows up in the label editor too. When trying to create swap space in the disklabel editor, I get the error message: "Unable to add /dev/ad1s1b as a swap device: No such file or directory". As far as I can tell I did exactly as described in the FAQ at http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/formatting-media/index.= html. >From a search with Google I learned that some other people had the "problem" with the wrong drive geometry too, but it seems to me that they all have *much* larger drives and are trying to set up multiboot-systems. Both drives worked well under Linux, so I think it's no hardware-problem. Any hints would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Chris
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