That Drive Geometry Bug

[Daniel Rudy]

At about the time of 12/26/2005 5:45 PM, nospam at apriori.net stated the
following:
> I am trying to back up the drive I have been using (which is now full)
> onto a 60GB Seagate IDE drive - ST360020A. After a bunch of failures at
> configuring the disk, I did some searching on the web and found some info
> on the "drive geometry bug".
> 
> I followed the directions I found there - essentially, go into my BIOS at
> boot time, write down the drive geometry that the BIOS thinks I have and
> then plug those numbers into FreeBSD fdisk at the beginning of
> installation.
> 
> What happened:
> 1. FreeBSD complained that the drive geometry it was seeing was wrong, and
> was using its own best guess: 7297/255/63.
> 2. I hit "G" and edited the C/H/S to that which the BIOS reported:
> 28733/16/255.
> 3. I hit Enter; the installer said `Nope, you're wrong! I'm going to use
> my best guess instead!'
> 
> No matter how many times I try to enter the info, it changes it back to
> whatever it thinks is more correct.
> 
> I tried switching the head and sector info (trying 28733/255/16). but no joy.
> 
> Is there a way to coax the installer into cooperating?
> 
> Thanks -
> -- paz.

I just recently ran into this problem myself.  Just use FreeBSD's best
guess and it will work fine.  If you set the BIOS to LBA mode, you will
find that matches FreeBSD's best guess.

-- 
Daniel Rudy