what is the good geometry for disk WD10EADS

Patrick Proniewski patpro at patpro.net
Thu Nov 19 13:46:19 UTC 2009


Hello,

I've just added a WD10EADS disk in my FreeBSD box (<http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=559 
 >)

My mother board is few years old and supports only SATA I, so the  
drive is recognized as SATA150 (which is fine):

	ad6: 953869MB <WDC WD10EADS-00M2B0 01.00A01> at ata3-master SATA150

Unfortunately, I'm unable to find the right geometry in order to  
format/label the disk. Using sysintall interface to handle the new  
disk yields to this kind of alerts:

(1st alert)	WARNING:  A geometry of 1938021/16/63 for ad6 is  
incorrect ...
(2nd alert)	WARNING:  A geometry of 121601/255/63 for ad6 is  
incorrect ...
(3rd alert)	WARNING:  A geometry of 121601/255/63 for ad6 is  
incorrect ...
(ad lib)

So, the software tries to guess the right geometry, but fails and  
stick with wrong numbers (121601/255/63)

I have this:

	# diskinfo -v ad6
	ad6
		512         	# sectorsize
		1000204886016	# mediasize in bytes (932G)
		1953525168  	# mediasize in sectors
		1938021     	# Cylinders according to firmware.
		16          	# Heads according to firmware.
		63          	# Sectors according to firmware.


But fdisk thinks it's not good.

And mounting the formated disk fails (121601/255/63):

	# mount /dev/ad6s1c /backup
	mount: /dev/ad6s1c on /backup: incorrect super block

I don't know where to look, the BIOS says nothing about the geometry  
(unless I've missed something). It's on LBA mode.

patpro


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