POS system trashing hard drives during install - SOLVED

[John McDonnell]

> The BIOS by default is set to autodetect the mode for the hard drive and
> reports these settings:
> Cylinders:   19158
> Heads:                16
> Sectors:            255
> 
> Capacity: 40022MB
> 
> Changing to LBA mode reports:
> Cylinders:   4865
> Heads:           255
> Sectors:           63
> 
> Capacity: 40018 MB

I changed the BIOS from AUTO to LBA and was able to install FreeBSD on this POS system. Hopefully I can change the BIOS on the one I have at home to LBA instead of AUTO and have it recognize one of the 80 GB drives I previously tried to set up. But in any case, going forward on these computers, I at least know that I can get them to work with a little tweak to the BIOS HDD geometry reporting.

Thank you for your time.

-- 
John McDonnell
Penn Cambria School District
mcdonnjd at pcam.org