formatting disk for FreeBSD : Detecting IDE Primary Master ... [Press F4 to skip]

[illoai at gmail.com]

On 25/01/2008, Chris Whitehouse <cwhiteh at onetel.com> wrote:
> Nerius Landys wrote:
> >
> >
> > The earler comment about the disk being too big might be the issue.  Update
> > the motherboard's BIOS to the latest revision.  You may have to do some
> > digging to find this for an old motherboard.  Tell us if that helps.
> > _______________________________________________
>
> Some motherboards had an upper limit on hard disk size which I think was
> 32gb. Some drives have a jumper to limit the apparent size to 32gb (if
> that was the size).
>
> Also I no longer have hardware to test this on but if it is a BIOS
> problem I believe if you could put the hard disk in a newer machine for
> the install it would then boot in the older machine as FreeBSD accesses
> the disk directly, not through the BIOS.

Anecdotally, I have an old hp e-server that will not see
IDE drives larger than something like 8G.  I let the bios
autodetect to the wrong value, and it booted just fine and
once FreBSD was running the whole 20G drive was
perfectly visible and functional.

In any case, I suppose the OP could just use a floppy
boot disk, like slackware's:
http://slackware.mirrors.easynews.com/linux/slackware/slackware/isolinux/sbootmgr/
http://tinyurl.com/2evgaa
Which should bypass any (most) moronic bioses.

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