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

[J. Seth Henry]

>>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.

If FreeBSD is going to be the only OS on this disk, there is another
workaround. Dangerously dedicate the disk, and ignore the warnings.
Don't futz with the manual geometry settings - they almost always
cause grief. Instead, when you set up the slices, make sure that / is in
the first 512/8Gb (depending on your BIOS) of the disk.

Remember, FreeBSD has its own 32-bit ATA driver, and doesn't use the BIOS
calls afterwards. However, FreeBSD does depend on the BIOS until the kernel
loads. As long as you locate the kernel and partition map in an area that
the BIOS can see, you will be fine.

Alternately, you can dig up an older drive to "boot" the system, then pass
control to the hard disk later.

Regards,
Seth Henry