HDD Geometry Issues

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> My HDD is an ST340810A 3.31. The BIOS gives its stats as:
> 
> Cylinder:     19158
> Head:            16
> Precomp:          0
> Landing Zone: 19157
> Sector:         255
> 
> I found the official doc at
> http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/ata/st340810a.html although
> I'm not too sure how to interpret it.
> 
> When I go to allocate disk space during install, it says that a
> geometry of 77545/16/63 is incorrect and uses instead 4865/255/63. Even
> when I reset the geometry to 19158/16/255, it says that's wrong too.
> 
> If I use the entire disk with 'A', I see:
> 
>   Offset  Size(ST)       End   Name  PType     Desc  Subtype
>        0        63        62   ---      12   unused     0
>       63  78156162  78156224  ad0s1      8  freebsd    165
> 78156225      9135  78165359   ---      12   unused     0

Somebody who really knows about this stuff needs to write some
verbiage for the handbook.

What I have read and what seems to work for me is that the geometry
on currently modern drives is "virtual" as far as the OS is concerned
and that you should go ahead and just slice and partition the disk
and build your file systems.   If it works, don't worry about the
geometry messages.

////jerry

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