hidden disk geometry on Compaq Presario V2000

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

Lorin Lund <gmail.com!lorin.lund at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:

> I have a Compaq Presario Notebook in the V2000 series.
> I just replaced the hard drive because the original was getting
> disk errors.
>
> I have a WD Scorpio 120 GB.  When I try to load FreeBSD I get an
> error message when I get to the partition the disk stage.  It
> says my disk geometry is wrong.  It says I need to use whatever
> numbers my BIOS uses.  But my BIOS doesn't show the disk geometry
> numbers anywhere I can see.  How can I proceed?  How can I find
> out what disk geometry to use?

One method, which I think may be mentioned in the Handbook, is to
boot the Windows install CD (that presumably came with the Presario)
and use its fdisk to create a small partition.  You don't need to
actually install Windows, just create a partition as if you were
going to install it.  Then boot the FreeBSD CD and sysinstall will
figure out the geometry from the Windows master boot record.