boot problem (stage 2 boot?)

[Sean]

Hi guys,

Just wanted to say thanks for all the helpful suggestions.
Played with things and got into the geometry idea as the possible cause.
Did some more work, adjusting bios and geometry settings around the disk 
and just a few minutes ago after yet another go at installing the laptop 
just booted up!

I in fact looked twice to make sure it booted on its own and not with 
the cd installed, it was not completely inserted and I still pulled the 
disk out completely to convince myself.

What I finally did was to do a fdisk during a FixIT session and marked 
down the settings.

The laptop bios would not take all six digits of the cylinders, so I 
entered five of them, adjusted the heads, and when setting up the disk 
during the install of FreeBSD set the geometry of the disk to match what 
fdisk reported and that seemed to do the trick.
It is an older laptop so I guess that it was not designed with a 60G 
hard drive in mind. The previous drive was only 6G. Big difference.

Again, the laptop has booted, and is currently doing some compiling.
Hopefully the rest will go without problems, the laptop ran fine with 
the 6G drive so I am not expecting any other problems.

The only real annoying part is that it is a real pain to find detailed 
info on this western digital drive,

			Thanks again,
			Sean