Problems with 170MB HD (FreeBSD 6.0)

[Christian Wurst]

> install as without swap on 10GB drive withour touching this 170MB at all.
>
>
> then (after booting installed system)
>
> dd if=/dev/zero bs=512k count=1 of=/dev/your_170MB_whole_disk (like
> /dev/ad1)
>
> and
>
> swapon -a /dev/ad1
>
>
> if it works - put
>
> /dev/ad1 none swap sw 0 0
>
> in /etc/fstab

Thanks for the reply. I did as you described above:

# dd if=/dev/zero bs=512 count=1 of=/dev/ad1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes transferred in 0.01<something> secs

... which looks good I'd say.

But the swapon command returned a warning message:
WARNING: reducing size to maximum of 67108864 blocks per swap unit

I wasn't sure if that is ok. As a simple test I unpacked a rather big
tarball and hoped the system would swap. Eventually it did try to swap
it seems, because I got a lot of the following error messages from
ad1:

ad1: TIMEOUT - WRITE retrying (0 retries left) LBA=2152
ad1: FAILURE - SETFEATURES SET TRANSFER MODE
status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=5<ABORTED,ILLEGAL_LENGTH>

These messages are repeated a number of times with different values
for LBA, finally it stops with

swap_pager: I/O error - pageout failed; blkno 292, size 28627, error 5

Could this be because I didn't tell the system the correct geometry
settings and it still thinks I have a 18863/255/63-disk?