Using 'incorrect' HD geometry.

[John Murphy]

Mr J. Happy Chappy here, just noting a few observations:

Jerry McAllister's and Lila's suggestions were quite right that the
installer's fdisk would not affect the other partitions on the HD
if it's allowed to just do its thing.  Its interpretation of the
geometry was entirely useful.

Reinstalling (via FTP) and changing the partitions in the disklabel
editor prevented the warning about using existing /dev but didn't
make the fresh install boot.  Had to reconfigure the boot manager
(Ranish Partition Manager's smallest configuration) simply by saving
it.  I moved its 'active' partition from the FreeBSD slice to the
win2k one, but I don't think that was what did it.

As I had only done a minimal install, I tried installing the man
pages from the disk and DVD drive I had initially tried to install
from, and saw loads of similar read/write errors.  The drive works
flawlessly under windows and the disk is 'known good' as I have
used it previously on other hardware.  In fact; I was able to install
the man pages from the same disk in another drive on the same PC:

acd0: DVDR <PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-108/1.14> at ata1-master UDMA66
acd1: CDRW <LITE-ON LTR-24103S/XB03> at ata1-slave UDMA33

Those drives are connected to the motherboard with a standard 40
conductor cable, not a proper 80 conductor one.  I'll replace that
soon and follow up to this message if it prevents the r/w errors.
I'm expecting that to be the most likely cause :)

Lastly (sorry for the verbosity), after the first successful run of
the newly installed 6.0 and the tweak of the boot manager, when I
ran the win2k installation it brought up an explorer window showing
the contents of the e: virtual drive (the last one on the first HD)
and a message box exclaiming that "windows had finished installing
my new hardware" and the system needed to be re-booted.  I did so
and all's well that ends well...  Xorg, nVidia drivers and KDE next.

Thanks for reading.

-- 
John.