Installing a second hard disk

[Chuck Swiger]

Hi--

On Mar 13, 2007, at 10:05 AM, Aitor San Juan wrote:
> I am trying to install a secondary hard disk in a Intel-based PC
> with FreeBSD 5.4
>
> This secondary disk's capacity is 250 Gb. When I enter sysintall
> to try to format it and create a slice, FreeBSD says that the
> geometry of disk is not correct. I, then, type in the values detected
> by the BIOS as suggested, but FreeBSD still complains that those
> are not valid. FreeBSD sees the new disk as a disk of approx. 131 GB.
>
> So my question is: where is the problem? Is it that FreeBSD is not
> able to recognise such a big disk capacity?

FreeBSD will recognize large disks, but your hardware itself needs to  
support what's known as LBA48 addressing to properly work with drives  
larger than 137.4 GB.  Make sure that you've got the latest BIOS  
update for your MB installed, and try to make sure that the drive is  
configured to use LBA or "auto" access mode, rather than C/H/S.

Also, you should ignore the warning about the geometry under these  
circumstances rather than entering a manual geometry...C/H/S mode is  
going to waste most of the available disk space, so you don't want to  
use it.  First hit from google suggests a site here: http://www. 
48bitlba.com/ with some tools...I haven't looked into them, but it  
looks like they have a utility to check your BIOS for LBA48  
compatibility.

-- 
-Chuck