*BSD News Article 36330


Return to BSD News archive

Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!spool.mu.edu!news.cs.indiana.edu!usenet.ucs.indiana.edu!pi
From: pi@indiana.edu (Raymond L. Gilbert)
Subject: Re: New disklabel not working?  256 heads?????
Message-ID: <CwFytE.B2D@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>
Sender: news@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu (USENET News System)
Nntp-Posting-Host: xyplex4-2-1.ucs.indiana.edu
Reply-To: pi@nickel.ucs.indiana.edu
Organization: A FreeBSD Enthusiast
References: <GILBERT.94Sep19150356@hydra1c.cs.utk.edu>
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 1994 18:46:26 GMT
Lines: 23

Thus it was recorded by the prophets, gilbert@cs.utk.edu (Steve Gilbert) said:
>I just bought a new Connor IDE disk.  I get this error at boot time:
>
>wd1: can't handle 256 heads from partition table (controller value 16 restored)

WOW! Someone else has finally seen this error! :-)  I have a Connor 
CFA340A IDE disk, and ever since the day I installed FreeBSD 1.0 I've
had this problem.  I used it like that for months, and it seemed to work
fine because the controller value was restored.  The problem came during
the install procedure when fdisk wrote the partition table.  I wiped my
hard drive out and reran the install procedure several times--it always
wrote to my parition table that I had 256 heads.  So I did the only
thing I could do--I used 'fdisk -i' to rewrite the partition table to
tell it, dammit, it only has 16 heads. WARNING: I don't think it needs
to be said, but just in case... rewriting one's partition table is
an excellent way to lose all your data on your hard drive, so take
appropriate precautions or pay the consequences. :-)
-- 
/----------------------------------------------------------------------------\
| Raymond L. Gilbert       | "...the present rule in computing the circle's  |
| pi@indiana.edu           |  area is entirely wrong..."                     |
| IUB Dept. of Physics     |  - Bill No. 246, Indiana State Legislature, 1897|
\----------------------------------------------------------------------------/