*BSD News Article 36021


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From: gilbert@cs.utk.edu (Steve Gilbert)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: New disklabel not working?  256 heads?????
Date: 21 Sep 1994 17:03:29 GMT
Organization: CS Labs, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Lines: 41
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <GILBERT.94Sep21130329@hydra3a.cs.utk.edu>
References: <GILBERT.94Sep19150356@hydra1c.cs.utk.edu> <35mbg2$ro1@news.uni-c.dk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hydra3a.cs.utk.edu
In-reply-to: jjw@tkemi.klb.dth.dk's message of 20 Sep 1994 09:54:10 GMT

In article <35mbg2$ro1@news.uni-c.dk> jjw@tkemi.klb.dth.dk (Joachim Wlodarz) writes:

   Steve Gilbert (gilbert@cs.utk.edu) wrote:
   :         Hi.  I'm using FreeBSD 1.1.5-R, and I just bought
   : a new Connor IDE disk to daisy-chain with my other one.
   : I got the disklabel and eveything done fine.  The disk
   : is partitioned correctly and all the filesystems are there
   : and accessible.  There's just one funny thing.  I get this
   : error at boot time:

   : wd1: can't handle 256 heads from partition table (controller value 16 restored)

   I think that your partition table was overwritten by disklabel. There are two
   possibilities of getting rid of this message:

   1) run fdisk on wd1, update what needed (you may see very strange figures here...). This could be dangerous !

   2) repartition wd1 from scratch, including 1 cyl. offset for the BSD partition.

   The first method was succesful in my case, but I've tried that on an empty
   drive :). I think that the second method is the right one, according to the
   standard PC partitioning scheme.

Okay, I think I'm going to go for your method number 1, since there's
also been someone else who successfully did this (sorry, I forgot your
name).  I haven't  installed anything on the drive yet.  It's going
to be a home area and a new /usr/local partition eventually, but I've 
been afraid to install anything on it until I figure out what gives.
I wound my way through the kernel source until I found the message.
The file is called wd.c, but I can't remember offhand what directory
it was in (do a find).  I tried to figure out what it's doing, but
I'm afraid my programming skills aren't good enough to hack kernel
source, yet.  If anyone can give me a better expanation so that I
at least understand what's happening, I would appreciate it.  Until
then I'm going to go home and run fdisk.  Thanks to everyone who
replied.

--
Steve Gilbert    Internet: gilbert@cs.utk.edu
Backups, Department of Computer Science
University of Tennessee, Knoxville