Disk geometry, 5.3b7 install

[Chuck Swiger]

freebsd at dreamchaser.org wrote:
[ ... ]
> The only problem is that the geometry was reported as bad by
> sysinstall, and implied I needed to change it.

When you access a drive in LBA mode, the BIOS reports a "fake" geometry.  This 
is the warning you see, but you probably do not need to change anything, just 
create a new FreeBSD partition in the unused space.

> Yet the partition step appears to have changed it already, or is
> assuming it will be changed.

The installer is displaying the existing partition table as it is on the disk, 
which shows an NTFS filesystem (presumably Windows).  Your job is to add a new 
partition to hold FreeBSD.

> I don't understand what the situation is:
>   sysinstall reported geometry as 155061/16/63 and said it was bad
>   then partitioning assumes it will be  9729/255/63
> Do I actually have to run pfdisk to change it from 155061/16/63 to
> 9729/255/63?

No.

> One more question:
> 
> The installation notes say the root partition must be below cylinder
> 1024.  If I want a largish (8G) partition for windows, how do I
> accomplish this?

This limitation was a problem with older BIOSes which depended on booting 
using the pre-LBA C/H/S style geometry.  I believe even that issue could be 
solved by using a boot manager like GAG, but I doubt you'll run into this 
problem either if your BIOS understands LBA.

-- 
-Chuck