new hard drive, new problems, possibly related to 16383 cylinder spec

[David Banning]

On Sun, Apr 27, 2003 at 02:52:21PM -0700, Ross Lippert wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We installed a new harddrive over here.  The first sign something was screwy
> was when the FBSD (4.8) installed said "this drive has 74123 [some number
> about there] cylinders and that is impossible!  Please specify the geometry
> manually" (well I didn't write the message down, so that's more of a
> paraphrase ofit).
> 
> After reading up on the fact that larger than 8GB drives (the new one is
> 40GB) will report 16383x16x63 as the geometry, it seemed to me like this drive
> was slightly violating this spec and reporting its true cylinder count.  So
> we manually set the geom to 16383x16x63 and proceeded merrily along.

I don't know anything about your machine, but I know I've had some older
pentium 100's and pentium 300's which have the 8 meg barrier. The only way,
as far as I know to overcome it, is to replace the bios. In my case,
considering the cost of the bios, I just bought a new machine.