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From: nichols@doc.cc.utexas.edu (Stewart Nichols)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: New disklabel not working? 256 heads?????
Date: 26 Sep 1994 18:23:50 -0500
Organization: The University of Texas at Austin; Austin, Texas
Lines: 48
Sender: stewart nichols <nichols@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu
Message-ID: <367l66$3p@doc.cc.utexas.edu>
References: <GILBERT.94Sep19150356@hydra1c.cs.utk.edu> <CwFytE.B2D@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>
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In article <CwFytE.B2D@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>,
Raymond L. Gilbert <pi@nickel.ucs.indiana.edu> wrote:
>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. :-)
In the 1.1.5.1 version of the Filesystem diskette it asks you
what offset to use (in cylinders) for the bsd portion of the
disk and presents you with [1]: as the default. This IS CORRECT.
Make sure that you use it. The entire first cylinder needs to
be set aside for the partition table. When you are putting in
an offset with disklabel, however, the number is interpreted
as SECTORS: enter the number of sectors for a whole cylinder.
HELPFULL HINT: Drag out your original floppies and partition
your second drive using the Filesystem diskette
(boot from the Kernal diskette, then load the
Filesystem diskette and use it to init the disk
as if you were going to use the new disk as a
boot disk.)
Copy down the disktab information that is displayed
before the actual label is applied. You can then
either go ahead and have the floppy make the disk-
label (it will force a minimum swap partition on
you if you do this, but extra swap space is usually
a Good Idea), or add the disktab entry it gave you
to /etc/disktab (adjusting the swap partition as
appropriate) and then use disklabel from a
running system to make the label.
stewart nichols
nichols@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu