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Date:      Mon, 9 Oct 2000 11:32:19 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Mike Jeays <jeays@statcan.ca>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Cc:        Jim Graham <jim@n5ial.gnt.com>
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD 4.1.1 refuses to see 30GB hard drive as > 2GB
Message-ID:  <Pine.SOL.3.96.1001009112411.15621A-100000@austral>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10010081509050.495-100000@parmenides.utp.net>

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I installed a new 10GB disk last week, and suffered the following
problems.

I mounted it in a Pentium 120 as the second drive, and created a 4 GB
slice for FreeBSD, and a 2GB slice for Win95, leaving the rest unused.  I
installed FreeBSD (3.1), and it ran fine.  Then I used Win95 to format the
DOS partition, and that seemed to work too.

When I rebooted FreeBSD, it ran for a few moments (getting all the way
into the KDE toolkit), and then spontaneously rebooted.  On rebooting
again, the /usr filesystem was damaged beyond repair - fsck threw up its
hands in disgust. 

I have now devoted the entire disk to FreeBSD, and it seems to run fine.
Am I living in a fool's paradise, or can I reasonably expect it to run OK
if I don't let Win95 anywhere near the 10GB disk?

BIOS is an Award Modular 4.51PG, Rev 1.04.




On Sun, 8 Oct 2000, Janko van Roosmalen wrote:

> Some time I played around with a 13 GB disk in an old 486-120 system which
> only recognizes disk up to +- 8GB using LBA.
> By setting the BIOS translation modes to NORMAL the kernel boot messages
> showed the right geometry, fdisk agreed also and I was able to partition
> the disk.
> 
> When I moved this disk to a 150 MHz Pentium Pro ATX system, this did not
> work. I had to manually enter the geometry (user defineable) in the BIOS.
> You could check if your BIOS allows to enter an user defineable geometry.
> 
> fdisk has an option to set the disk geometry (option G) so you can coach
> fdisk to use another geometry.
> 
> I am still running FreeBSD 3.2 release, and not 4.1.1 so you mileage may
> vary.
> 
> 
> ===Janko van Roosmalen - Vught - Netherlands===
> 
> On Sat, 7 Oct 2000, Jim Graham wrote:
> 
> > I've just attempted to add a Maxtor MXT 53073H4 30.7GB hard drive
> > to my system.  Unfortunately, no matter what I do, FreeBSD 4.1.1
> > insists that it's only 2014 MB.
> > 
> > Here's what I've tried.....
> > 
> > First, I tried using /stand/sysinstall.  No matter what I did, I could
> > not convince it to use more than 2 GB.  :-(
> > 
> > Then, I used a (shudder) Win98 boot disk and its fdisk---it was quite happy
> > to fdisk and format a 29.9GB dos partition for me.  When I tried to mount
> > that using FreeBSD, FreeBSD complained, saying:  "ad1s1: slice extends
> > beyond end of disk: truncating from 60018777 to 4124673 sectors".  I tried
> > to write to that disk anyways...bad move---FreeBSD went tango uniform
> > (i.e., it locked up hard).
> > 
> > I've changed the BIOS settings (which I'm not convinced that any Unix
> > would use anyways), using LBA, LARGE, NORMAL, AUTO, etc....nothing makes
> > any difference.
> > 
> > It seems that no matter what I do, FreeBSD insists on seeing this as a
> > 2 GB drive.  :-(
> > 
> > System details:
> > 
> >    650 MHz AMD Athlon on an ASUS K7V Motherboard
> >    ad0 (seen quite happily):
> >       19547MB <FUJITSU MPF3204AH> [39714/16/63] at ata0-master using UDMA33
> >    ad1 (fubar):
> >       2014MB <Maxtor 53073H4> [4092/16/63] at ata0-slave using UDMA66
> > 
> > Note that the above info for ad1 is what FreeBSD is seeing at boot, and
> > is *NOT* what's stored in the BIOS config.....  BIOS says 4092/255/63
> > or 1024/255/63, depending on what the settings are (LBA, etc).
> > 
> > Forgive my ignorance, but the only time I've ever tried to use a disk
> > this large before was on a Sun Enterprise 3500, which didn't have the
> > limitations of the PC architecture.
> > 
> > Has anyone run into this problem before?  Can anyone offer any fixes
> > other than starting over by installing FreeBSD from scratch so (hopefully)
> > it will figure out what to do on its own?  I saw questions resembling this
> > on the list archives, but if there were answers to those questions, I
> > missed them....
> > 
> > Suggestions, comments, and even RTFMs (with a pointer to the FM that
> > I've missed, please), most welcome.
> > 
> > Thanks,
> >    --jim
> > 
> 
> 
> 
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