POS system trashing hard drives during install

[Warren Block]

On Tue, 22 Dec 2015, John McDonnell wrote:

> I just downloaded and booted from the NetBSD install disk and was presented with a screen I haven't seen in FreeBSD in some time. NetBSD was unable to match my hard drive to one detected by the BIOS. I remember when pretty much every install of FreeBSD would prompt me with that message about the reported geometry not matching. I can't recall why the prompt no longer shows up in FreeBSD, but perhaps it could be behind the issues I'm having?
>
> For comparision, here is what I have found about the geometry:
>
> NetBSD reports:
> Cylinders:   1023
> Heads:           255
> Sectors:           63
>
> The BIOS by default is set to autodetect the mode for the hard drive and reports these settings:
> Cylinders:   19158
> Heads:                16
> Sectors:            255

None of this has really mattered since drives became larger than... I 
want to say 4G.  The MBR spec said that partitions had to be specified 
in round CHS numbers, but that also is meaningless any more.  Although 
gpart enforces that for compatibility, but it is rare that a BIOS cares.

If an MBR partition layout created by bsdinstall does not work, I would 
clone the original drive partitioning with gpart (backup and restore). 
Then install FreeBSD bootcode and format the first partition with UFS. 
Then try to get bsdinstall to see that partition and install to it.