Installing FreeBSD

[DA Forsyth]

On 12 Jun 2008 , Telpiz Sorin entreated about
 "Installing FreeBSD":

>  tried several times to install 7.0-RELEASE x amd64 on my
> friend's machine that is eqiupped with hard drive manufactured by
> Samsung. The hard drive (master) appears to have SATA interface,
> nonetheless SYSINSTALL regognizes it as ad04! Besides, SYSINSTALL
> complains about the disk's geometry . The text console works very
> slowly, though the machine (ASUS motherboard) has 2 Gigs of RAM
> and a good GeForce video board. For comparison, my old IBM machine (
> PentiumII , 128Mb RAM , 16Mb video memory ) runs Free BSD much more
> faster. Could you help us fix the trouble? Best regards and much
> thanks. sorin at margelatto at yahoo.com     

I had this with my Linux box at home.  The solution is to change the 
CMOS setting for the drive mode to 'enhanced' (on my motherboard at 
any rate).  If you use the compatibility mode then the chipset maps 
the SATA drives to the 'IDE' space and speed will be limited to 
somewhere around PIO4  (-:

in my experience, sysinstall ALWAYS complains about geometry and I 
always just leave it and it always just works. YMMV


--
       DA Fo rsyth            Network Supervisor
Principal Technical Officer -- Institute for Water Research
http://www.ru.ac.za/institutes/iwr/