FDisk won't detect or accept correct disk geometry from BIOS

[Derrick Ryalls]

> 
> I don't know.  I've never had to change away from "Auto" to 
> get any other OS 
> to install or boot from any of my hard drives, though, so I 
> really doubt 
> that is the problem.  I'm quite confident the problem must 
> lie with FreeBSD 
> itself, in the form of a bug or a lack of hardware support.  
> Although my 
> integrated IDE controller and all other basic hardware is on 
> the FreeBSD 
> supported hardware list.
> 

Not the best solution, but have you thought of using the Gag boot loader
to get around this? (sourceforge)

> 
> >
> > [ ... ]
> > > I definitely do not have hardware issues, because Linux, 
> Windows XP, 
> > > Windows 2000, BeOS, and SkyOS have all worked fine at various 
> > > points, and Windows XP
> > > continues to work fine :-)
> >
> > Your error message reflects a BIOS-level failure to find a bootable 
> > partition.
> >
> > Do you already have a bootable partition on the system, and 
> are trying 
> > to install FreeBSD in a second partition?  If so, which 
> partition is 
> > marked active?
> 
> No.  The hard drive is the only hard drive attached (I 
> detached my two other 
> drives with WinXP and data files on them, so they couldn't 
> get inadvertently 
> hosed during installation... those two devices were on the 
> primary IDE 
> chain.  I moved the blank hard drive and the CD-ROM drive, 
> which were on the 
> secondary IDE chain, onto the primary IDE chain to try to get FreeBSD 
> installed that way.  There's currently nothing on the 
> secondary IDE chain). 
> And, I did ensure in all my attempts that I marked the single 
> full-disk 
> slice I created with fdisk as bootable.

My thought here is to double check that the drive is in the master
position on the ribbon.