disk geometry issues during sysinstall of 5.2.1

[Goodleaf, John M]

Hello,
I have a fairly new test machine configured on an Intel 875 (yes, the ICH5
controller) board. I have a standard ATA-133 drive and two SATA drives,
Maxtor 80GB. They are not configured as a RAID device. Here's the thing:
When I try to install FBSD, I get the apparently common disk geometry
problem warnings for each drive (with the Boot Mgr MBR setting, and yes,
including the parallel ATA drive). It instructs me to enter correct
geometry, as reported by the BIOS. But the BIOS on this board doesn't report
a geometry. I've scoured those stupid BIOS screens and haven't found
anything, nor has a search of the product manual. How do I get the "correct"
BIOS settings? 

Also, does it really matter? I've poked around the web and it seems like a
lot of folks have encountered this and simply chosen to ignore it. Certainly
there doesn't seem to be a definitive answer out there that I've seen. "Turn
on LBA" isn't really an issue for the still-bleeding 875PBZ. In the
5-CURRENT installation that currently exists on the machineI regularly get
crashes and kernel panics that are disk-related (I don't have those error
messages handy; I'm not expecting anyone to divine the answer?). Moreover, I
have gotten two hangs during installation using the 5.2.1 bootonly iso. I
don't really know why as it's a true hang--no error messages--but it occurs
shortly after filesystems are written and distro extraction begins. My
working hypothesis is that my PITA ICH5 controllers are fighting FBSD's
(new) twitchy SATA code. I dunno.

Whaddaya think?

-J