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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!lll-winken.llnl.gov!fastrac.llnl.gov!s1.gov!overload.lbl.gov!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!geraldo.cc.utexas.edu!huey.cc.utexas.edu!not-for-mail From: cseanf@huey.cc.utexas.edu (Chris Ficklin) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: FreeBSD installation on very big SCSI hard drives Date: 6 Jun 1994 21:45:00 -0500 Organization: The University of Texas - Austin Lines: 22 Message-ID: <2t0mvc$227@huey.cc.utexas.edu> References: <Pine.3.89.9406012001.F11505-0100000@calvin.chin.doc.ca> <CqvL01.9zF@tfs.com> <1994Jun4.161218.15589@nlm.nih.gov> NNTP-Posting-Host: huey.cc.utexas.edu >>>> 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 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). > . . . . You don't need to change the translation under BSD unless your DOS partition is past the 1024 cylinder boundary. BSD ignores the BIOS except for one call on boot. When BSD installs tell it 32HDs, 64SPT, & the size of your drive in MB for cyls. DOS won't see that the partition goes beyond the 1024 cyl boundary but DOS doesn't care. I don't know whether or not LILO is limited by 1024 cyl but the question was regarding FreeBSD. If LILO is then that is LILO's problem.