From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Jun 17 19:51:22 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from john.baldwin.cx (john.geekhouse.net [64.81.6.51]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 62EDE37B83E for ; Sat, 17 Jun 2000 19:51:18 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from john@baldwin.cx) Received: (from john@localhost) by john.baldwin.cx (8.9.3/8.9.3) id TAA04348; Sat, 17 Jun 2000 19:51:25 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from john) Message-Id: <200006180251.TAA04348@john.baldwin.cx> X-Mailer: XFMail 1.4.0 on FreeBSD X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2000 19:51:25 -0700 (PDT) Organization: BSD, Inc. From: John Baldwin To: Jeff Kreska Subject: RE: install / boot last 3 gig of 25 gig drive Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 15-Jun-00 Jeff Kreska wrote: > I tryed to install FreeBSD 3.3,3.4, and 4.0 release on the last three > gig of a 25 gig drive with no success. > > After an install attempt the partition table of my disk is corrupt. Now > it is so screwed up that Partition Magic cant read it. > > Through testing I determined that all I have to do to corrupt the > partition table is load the fdisk style editor (boot the install cd ) > and hit "w" to write the info. I changed nothing and only performed a > write. > > Looking at the partition info below, it appears as though the installer > is having some sort of 1023/4 cyclnder limit problem. I thought this > was not an issue with LBA? The problem is that we still have to use the BIOS to talk to the drive during the boot process, and by default we use CHS addressing, since that is what works everywhere. I'm working on changing this so that we detect and support LBA mode so we can boot off of larger disks, but adding this support into some parts of the bootstrap has some far reaching consequences. As a result, boot0 most likely won't have support for large drives until 5.0, or possibly 4.2 or later on the 4.x branch. -- John Baldwin -- http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/ PGP Key: http://www.cslab.vt.edu/~jobaldwi/pgpkey.asc "Power Users Use the Power to Serve!" - http://www.FreeBSD.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message