Difference of opinion about my disk geometry

[Bruce Cran]

On Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:33:04 -0700
Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> Below are what the various OS' think about the disk. (Ignore the fact 
> that the 3rd partition has an unknown type, that used to be a FreeBSD 
> partition that seems to have been mangled by grub2, which I'm going
> to fix later.) When I run FreeBSD fdisk from sysinstall I get the
> following message:
> It is safe to use 484521/16/63 as the disk geometry blah blah blah,
> Do you want to change this?
> I've been saying no, but now I think what I want to do is say yes,
> and change it to 30401/255/63 which is what Windows and Linux think
> it is, and repartition the whole drive. Does that sound reasonable?
> 
> Of course this prompts me to ask the questions of why are we looking
> at this differently than Windows and Linux, and what are the 
> advantages/disadvantages to the 2 methods?

CHS is totally obsolete, and can be ignored for anything but really old
computers I think - LBA has been used since about 2000. If you use the
modern partitioning tool in Windows, diskpart.exe, you don't get told
about the geometry at all; if you use gpart in FreeBSD you get told
about the fwheads and fwsectors but partitions are specified in terms
of an offset.

-- 
Bruce Cran