Date: Fri, 2 Feb 1996 22:24:07 -0500 From: Pierre Sarrazin <sarrazip@CS.McGill.CA> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Hard disk with 2466 cylinders Message-ID: <199602030324.WAA09368@maggie.cs.mcgill.ca>
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Hi. I am thinking of buying a 1.2G hard disk on which I would install
MS-DOS 6.0/6.22 and FreeBSD 2.1.0. I am worried about the ability of my
PC to use all of the disk's cylinders.
My PC has a GMB-486UNP "80486 VESA Mainboard" (I have the manual) with
a 486DX2-66 and 8 megs of memory. It currently has an IDE disk
controller. All these things were bought in June of 1994. When the PC
boots, I see this:
AMIBIOS (C) 1993 American Megatrends Inc.
On the BIOS chip itself, I see
AMIBIOS
AMERICAN MEGATRENDS
486DX ISA BIOS (c) 1993
AB2766757
The hard disk I am thinking of buying is a Samsung which formats to
1.2G according to the store. The following is its geometry:
2466 cylinders
16 heads
63 sectors
The store tells me that if I don't have an "LBA" board, DOS will not
be able to use more than the first 528 megs. They tell me that 1993
is too old a year for my board to be of the "LBA" type. They say that
unlike other large hard disks, the Samsung does not come with a "driver"
that would allow DOS to use the entire disk.
Of course, they know almost nothing about FreeBSD/Linux/Unix so they
can't tell me if this is a DOS-only problem.
My objective is to have about one half of the disk for MS-DOS and
one half for FreeBSD. There should be a boot manager that allows me
to select the operating system I want.
N.B.: I currently run MS-DOS 5.0 and FreeBSD 2.0.5 on a 325M disk
(1010 cylinders) on the PC that I described, with an appropriate
boot manager.
Thanks for your time.
Pierre Sarrazin <sarrazip@cs.mcgill.ca> [Montreal]
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