Using 'incorrect' HD geometry.

[John Murphy]

"fbsd_user" <fbsd_user at a1poweruser.com> wrote:

>Write failure on transfer! (wrote 77187 bytes of 1425408 bytes)
>
>When I got this error message during install it mean the hard drive
>had a bad spot on it.
>This had nothing to do with the hd geometry used.  Bet your hd is
>udma 33. Think this is a bug in fbsd since 4.11 where this problem
>did not occur. I think since 5.x the udma 33 ata driver does not
>handle the bad track pointer to the reassigned track. Or all the hd
>alt tracks have been used up all ready.

Thanks for the suggestion.  I'm fairly sure the hd is ok and it's
udma66 at least.  Actually I've had some success just now.  There
was that error message in the Alt F2 screen output saying:

acd0: FAILURE - READ_BIG HARDWARE ERROR asc=0x08 ascq=0x03 error=0

I didn't think it was particularly important as the Alt F1 screen
was saying "write failure", but I decided to try an (minimal) FTP
install and it actually completed with absolutely no write errors!
It doesn't boot, probably due to a warning I ignored that it was
using the existing /dev (as the partition existed).

I'll try it again after tea and insist on a new set of partitions,
which I believe will cure that problem.

I'm so happy to be getting there! Many thanks to all for the help.

>What I did was to allocate an very small unused partition that
>included that area and then allocated the remainder of the hd to the
>slice I installed fbsd in.

Hah! I've done that with a 40G laptop drive I was given, which had
loads of bad sectors.  But there's a good 35GB on it running 6.0 :)

-- 
John.