Sysinstall and drive geometry

[David Dooley]

Hi,

I wondering if any one can offer me some advice with a problem I am having
configuring drives and installing FreeBSD 5.2 on an Intel box.

The Box has a SuperMicro motherboard with an Intel 1.6GH P4 686-class
CPU/1024GB Ram and there are currently 3 IDE controllers with 6 drive
channels, 2 channels provided by the motherboard (FreeBSD probe reports
the system controller as an Intel ICHR UDMA100 Controller), this has what
I want to be the bootable drive configure as Primary master, no primary
slave, the secondary channel has a Ricoh CDRW drive (Master) and a Samsung
DVD-ROM (Slave).

Then, their are 2 Promise PDC20286 UDMA100 IDE controllers installed that
have drives configured thus

Controller 1

Primary Master         200GB drive
                       WDC WD2000JB-32EVA0/15.05R15
Primary Slave          100GB drive
                       WDC1000BB-00CCB0/22.04A22
Secondary Master       200GB drive
                       WDC WD2000JB-32EVA0/15.05R15
Secondary Slave        100GB drive
                       WDC1000BB-00CCB0/22.04A22

Controller 2

Primary Master         200GB drive
                       WDC WD2000JB-32EVA0/15.05R15
Primary Slave          100GB drive
                       WDC1000BB-00CCB0/22.04A22
Secondary Master       200GB drive
                       WDC WD2000JB-32EVA0/15.05R15
Secondary Slave        100GB drive
                       WDC1000BB-00CCB0/22.04A22


All drives are connected with 80pin flat ribbon cables to their respective
controllers with the master drive being at the end of the cable

The problem I am having is that when ever I go into sysinstall either from
the installer or /stand/sysinstall it complains that the drive geometry is
incorrect and suggests that it should be fixed, but if I try and set it to
what the boot probe reports it comes back and says that the geometry is
still incorrect and won't allow me to change it. If I let it run with the
geometry it selects the install currently panics and hangs the box.

The FreeBSD boot probe reports the drive geometries of the WD800 system
disk as 155061/16/63 sysinstall wants to use 9729/255/63

All the 200GB drives are reported by the boot probe as
      387621/16/63 sysinstall would rather 24321/255/63
And like wise with the 100GB drives, the probe reports
      193821/16/63 and again sysinstall wants 12161/255/63

If I allow sysinstall to select what it thinks is a suitable drive
geometry after a reboot it has returned to the original and sysinstall
complaines all over again.

Please could any one offer me an explanation as to the discrepancy between
the probe and sysinstall and how to marry the 2 together.

I will be changing all the drive connector cables to those that support
UDMA100 so as to get the best speed out of the drives, I am unsure if this
is the source of my problem, but at this point I will try anything.

Thanks for any help with this

Regards

David Dooley




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David Dooley