*BSD News Article 36305


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From: jjw@tkemi.klb.dth.dk (Joachim Wlodarz)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: New disklabel not working?  256 heads?????
Date: 20 Sep 1994 09:54:10 GMT
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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)

: ...what could be causing this?  The disk has 16 heads, so the "controller
: value" is correct and everything works fine.  Why would it be initially
: looking for 256 heads?  No disk on the planet has 256 heads.  I've 
: checked everything I can imagine.../etc/disktab...output from "disklabel"...
: the BIOS settings...nothing ever mentions the number 256 in relation
: to anything.  Does anyone have any ideas?  Any help would be greatly
: appreciated.
: --
: Steve Gilbert    Internet: gilbert@cs.utk.edu
: Backups, Department of Computer Science
: University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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.

Regards,


-jjw.