Using 'incorrect' HD geometry.

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> I'm currently dual booting FreeBSD-5.3 and Windows 2000 on a WD800BB
> 80GB IDE HD.  It all seems to be working very well, but now I want to
> install 6.0 on the slice where 5.3 is.  fdisk -s currently says:

Nowdays, the geometry on the drives seems to be 'virtual' and so
you should just let the installer/fdisk do what it wants and leave
it that way.   If it doesn't work the way the installer wants to
then there may be a problem.  But if it works, just ignore the warnings.

////jerry

> 
> /dev/ad0: 155061 cyl  16 hd  63 sec
> 
> Part     Start       Size   Type  Flags
>   1:        63    5981220   0x0b   0x00
>   2:   5981283   13971447   0xa5   0x80
>   3:  19958400  136337040   0x0f   0x00
> 
> The problem is that the installer says that geometry of 155061/16/63
> is incorrect and suggests using the BIOS geometry of 38309/16/255.
> 
> I'm worried that if I change the geometry I may lose the existing
> Win2k slices (1 and 3 in the fdisk output).  I'm not even convinced
> that what the BIOS says is correct, as I get the following from other
> sources:
> 
> 16383/16/63   from the Western Digital web site.
> 10337/240/63  probed values from Scisoft Sandra.
> 10337/240/63     "      "     "  Ranish Partition Manager.
> 
> If I make sure the installer uses the existing incorrect geometry,
> does that guarantee that the other slices will be unaffected?
> 
> What future problems may that lead to?
> 
> -- 
> John.
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