From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Feb 2 19:24:36 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id TAA09507 for questions-outgoing; Fri, 2 Feb 1996 19:24:36 -0800 (PST) Received: from maggie.cs.mcgill.ca (sarrazip@maggie.CS.McGill.CA [132.206.51.242]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id TAA09462 for ; Fri, 2 Feb 1996 19:24:17 -0800 (PST) Received: (from sarrazip@localhost) by maggie.cs.mcgill.ca (8.6.10/8.6.9) id WAA09368 for questions@freebsd.org; Fri, 2 Feb 1996 22:24:07 -0500 Date: Fri, 2 Feb 1996 22:24:07 -0500 From: Pierre Sarrazin Message-Id: <199602030324.WAA09368@maggie.cs.mcgill.ca> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Hard disk with 2466 cylinders Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk 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 [Montreal]