Identical hard drives, different disklabel sectors/cylinders

[wbwither at bobball.uchicago.edu]

Thanks for the responses.  Sorry for the delay in replying.

orville weyrich said:

> (1) make sure that the BIOS settings are the same for
> both drives.

I don't think this is an issue, as I haven't touched the BIOS
for this IDE card, and it should be on full-auto mode.

> (2) is there a jumper on the drive itself that affects
> sector mapping?

No.

> (3) do you have all the /dev/ad4 and /dev/ad5 devices
> (try MAKEDEV ad)

I MAKEDEV'd both ad4 and ad5 at least once.

> (4) have you tried the
> /stand/sysinstall->configure->label method of editing
> the labels?  Does it report a discrepancy between BIOS
> and memory disk geometry?

Yes, I tried /stand/sysinstall several times, and actually
I can't remember whether it gave me that error.  However,
I have gotten that error many times in the past and was
under the impression that it was a fairly normal thing
and should be ignored.

> (5) have you tried using disklable -e to directly edit
> the labels to copy the "good" label to the "bad"
> drive?

Yes, I tried editing both labels, and it wouldn't take for either.

Christian Hiris said:

> Your disks slice tables holding different values for C/H/S geometry.
> You can  wipe out the slice tables with the dd(1) command and
> re-initialize them with  fdisk and bsdlabel or sysinstall. There is an
> example written on this in 'man  8 bsdlabel'.

I dd'd both drives several times.  I never used bsdlabel, as I was under
the impression that disklabel is more recent.
> IMHO there is only one thing that can go wrong with your configuration:
> If you  are booting your system from the mirror, I would test if both
> of your drives  are bootable.

Well, these disks are just extra storage under /var, and ad0 and ad1 are
the bootable disks in this system.  So I guess I don't have anything to
worry about.
Again, thanks for your help :)