Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!metro!ultima!kralizec.zeta.org.au!godzilla.zeta.org.au!not-for-mail From: bde@kralizec.zeta.org.au (Bruce Evans) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development Subject: Re: fdisk Date: 6 Feb 1994 05:30:32 +1100 Organization: Kralizec Dialup Unix Sydney - +61-2-837-1183, v.32bis and v.42bis Lines: 42 Message-ID: <2j0ok8INN3qc@godzilla.zeta.org.au> References: <0hI0M_u00WB7EC5GkR@andrew.cmu.edu> <2ipjg4$mcq@explorer.clark.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: godzilla.zeta.org.au In article <2ipjg4$mcq@explorer.clark.net>, Eric S. Hvozda <ack@clark.net> wrote: >In article <0hI0M_u00WB7EC5GkR@andrew.cmu.edu>, >Timothy J Kniveton <tim+@CMU.EDU> wrote: >>>are there any plans for FreeBSD to support a linux-style fdisk, which >>>*correctly* recognizes the disks' geometry? ... >Well I run NetBSD, but I'd be willing to bet FreeBSD works the same... > >The geometery reported by the kernel during auto-configure, is the native >geometery. It's read from the mfg's label. Things like 4drvutil.exe also FreeBSD (version 1.02 of the wd driver) doesn't report the geometry during auto-configure. The current version reports it. fdisk reports it. However, old MFM drives don't support reading the mfg's label and the driver guesses the geometry, usually incorrectly. The FreeBSD boot block contains a fake partition table for an 8G disk with 256 sectors/track. This becomes the real partition table if FreeBSD is installed on the whole disk. The bogus number of sectors/track happened not to matter with the old driver but it breaks with the current driver. >do this. Do you have the geometery translated in BIOS? Did you use pfdisk >to create the *BSD partition? > >If the geometery is wrong in BIOS, pfdisk will not help you since it reports >the BIOS's geometery, translated or not... fdisk should use the BIOS geometry for creating the BSD DOSpartition for consistency with other partitions. The problem is that the driver reports the native geometry to fdisk. It doesn't even know the BIOS geometry. >BTW, linux's pfdisk (at least the one from my old SLS 1.03 distribution) >reports BIOS geometery, not the native geometery. *BSD doesn't like >translated geometeries in general. The translation problems are fixed in the current version of the FreeBSD wd driver. The driver always handled translation stuff reasonably but it had some bugs. -- Bruce Evans bde@kralizec.zeta.org.au