Partitioning fails due to drive geometry inconsistency

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> Hello list.
> 
> I know this had been discussed quite often, but none of the posting
> google offered worked out for me. Please (B)Cc: me as I am not on the list.=
> =20
> 
> I have a Western Digital WDC WD400AB-00CMB0 40 GB IDE drive hooked in as
> pri slave in my system and wish to install FreeBSD on it. This is not my
> first install, but it won't work this time (using 5.2.1-R):
> 
> I try to partition the drive with fdisk during the installation process.
> Everytime I hit "w" to write the changes, the program catches ``sig 11''
> (segfault?). Curious thing is: I was able to delete partions but I
> cannot create new ones. I tried every option concerning bootsector (boot
> mngr, std mbr, none) and the error occures every time.
> 
> When I enter the fdisk tool it tells me that the drive geometry
> "778545/16/63" is wrong. I don't have a clue where it gets that value.
> The BIOS detects the geometry as 19158/16/255. The auto-corrected value
> is 4865/255/63 which equals the BIOS-setting when access mode is set to
> LBA manually. When I enter the geometry manually with "g", it still
> mourns the value 19158/16/255 is not correct and again falls back to
> those LBA values.

Check out this web page.   It is actually a review, but it contains some
information on this in the middle of the article that you may find helpful.

           http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=review-freeb

////jerry

> 
> Important to say: the drive seems to work well on WinXP. I encountered
> no problem there.  Using the DEBUG=3Dyes in the installation options menue
> revealed some UDMA ICRC ... crap error style messages.
> For this I played with UDMA und PIO-mode settings for IDE pri-slave in=20
> the BIOS. Unfortunately, nothing happens (save the above errors ;).
> 
> I hope anyone can help me with this issues which slowly driving me
> crazy... Thank you!
> 
> Carsten
> 
> 
> --=20
> Carsten Zimmermann
> mailto:cz at aegisnet.biz
> Tel.: +49-(0)40-98760543
> 
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