Return to BSD News archive
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!news.duke.edu!zombie.ncsc.mil!admii!lhc!lhc!kevin
From: kevin@lhc.nlm.nih.gov (Kevin Rosenberg)
Subject: Re: FreeBSD installation on very big SCSI hard drives
Message-ID: <1994Jun4.161218.15589@nlm.nih.gov>
Sender: news@nlm.nih.gov
Organization: National Library of Medicine
References: <Pine.3.89.9406012001.F11505-0100000@calvin.chin.doc.ca> <CqvL01.9zF@tfs.com>
Date: Sat, 4 Jun 94 16:12:18 GMT
Lines: 37
In article <CqvL01.9zF@tfs.com> julian@tfs.com (Julian Elischer) writes:
>In article <Pine.3.89.9406012001.F11505-0100000@calvin.chin.doc.ca> wmaton@calvin.chin.doc.ca ("William F. Maton") writes:
>>
>>
>>On Tue, 31 May 1994, Chuck Robey wrote:
>>
>>> I have a machine with 1005 megs of scsi, with the bottom 200 devoted
>>> (grudgingly) to dos, and the rest to FreeBSD. It works fine now,
>[.....]
>>
>
>I'm afraid I don't understand the problem with large drives...
>we are going to gaet problems when drive sizes get > 4GB but the next version of
>FreeBSD will have 64 bit file offsets so that'll go away.
>The SCSI system has always worked with drives > 1GB..
>I don't understand how people would think there was a problem..
>
>obviously I'm missing something here..
>[....]
>
>yours confusedly
>
>julian
>
Julian,
I believe the issue for drives > 1GB is the disk geometry and the cylinders
being > 1024 (bios limitation). For booting linux (which I use), I had
to repartition my hard disk and change my buslogic to > 1GB drive support,
and make my geometry 128 (default is 64) heads, 32 sectors, and 1020 cylinders
for my 2040MB hard disk. The booting program (lilo) couldn't work my original
partitioning (and geometry) which had a cylinder count of 2040 (and 64 heads).
Hope that help!