Disk geometry salad...

[Robert Storey]

> > 2) When installing FreeBSD, sysinstall warns that a geometry of the
> > first drive (1) as it detects it (77545/16/63) is incorrect and
> > can't be used. It automatically replaces the values with
> > 4865/255/63. The problem is that after replacing the geometry with
> > 4865/255/63 the number of LBA sectors (as listed in the Disk Slice
> > editor) becomes lower than the manufacturer spec (78,156,225 instead
> > of 78,165,360). What does this mean?

You've encountered a well-known bug in the installer. I've experienced
it too and so have many others.

During the install, when you're in the fdisk partition editor, just
hitting "g" is usually all you have to do to correct the bug. If you've
already installed, I'm not sure what you can do to correct the bug other
than go back and reinstall, this time hitting "g". There might be
another way to change disk geometry without doing that, but I don't know
how (anybody reading this know?).

You might want to take a look at the following article, the geometry bug
is discussed about 1/3 down from the top:

http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=review-freebsd

regards,
Robert