Date: Sun, 4 Feb 1996 22:33:36 -0800 (PST) From: Doug White <dwhite@riley-net170-164.uoregon.edu> To: Pierre Sarrazin <sarrazip@CS.McGill.CA> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Hard disk with 2466 cylinders Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960204222754.3831F-100000@gdi.uoregon.edu> In-Reply-To: <199602030324.WAA09368@maggie.cs.mcgill.ca>
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On Fri, 2 Feb 1996, Pierre Sarrazin wrote: > 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. > 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. That is correct. Main problem is that the BIOS can't address past 1024 cylinders (~528MB), unless you have an EIDE disk controller (Promise, CMD, etc), and guessing by the above you don't. Now, FreeBSD will be perfectly happy, since it doesn't use the BIOS to use the disk. Your DOS partition is going to have to be < 528MB for FreeBSD to boot. (is that right people?) Doug White | University of Oregon Internet: dwhite@gladstone.uoregon.edu | Residence Networking Assistant http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite | Computer Science Major
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