Diskgeometry - sysinstall bug?

[Erik Norgaard]

Hi,

I have problems making sysinstall behave, interactive or scripted. The 
disk is 60GB Hitachi Travelstar, on boot the kernel FreeBSD 5.3-STABLE 
identifies the geometry as: 116280/16/63, but sysinstall refuses these 
values as insane, and tries to rewrite the disk geometry to 7296/255/63.

Using all disk for slice 1 sysinstall writes the disklabel, but it fails 
to initialize the swap partition claming no such device /dev/ad0s1b, or 
I get write errors when I try to install.

On reboot (pxe), even though the new partition table and geometry was 
written, the kernel identifies the disk with the original geometry. It 
appears that I should go with the geometry the kernel thinks.

How do I get my disk sliced up from here?

Thanks, Erik

I have found the following code in disks.c which seems to be responsible:

     if (d->bios_cyl > 65536 || d->bios_hd > 256 || d->bios_sect >= 64) {
         Sanitize_Bios_Geom(d);
     }

I have previously had FreeBSD 4.10 on the disk, installed from CD with 
no problems. On my laptop (40GB), the disk geometry is  77520/16/63 
which should also fail in the above check I have 6.0-CURRENT, installed 
originally as 5.2.1 but upgraded with cvsup.

Running fdisk manually, I get the following output:

parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=116280 heads=16 sectors/tracks=63 (1008 blks/cyl)

Figures below won't work with BIOS for partions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are
cylinders=116280 heads=16 sectors/tracks=63 (1008 blks/cyl)

Information from DOS bootblock is:
1: sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
     start 63, size 117210177 (57231 Meg), flag 80 (active)
         beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
         end: cyl 567/ head 15/ sector 63
2: <UNUSED>
3: <UNUSED>
4: <UNUSED>

Confirming to write disk, fdisk prints the following summary:

/dev/ad0: 116280 cyl 16 hd 63 sec
Part        Start        Size Type Flags
    1           63   117210177 0xa5 0x80

This all looks OK, just like the kernel likes it...

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