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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!news.kei.com!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!zib-berlin.de!news.tu-chemnitz.de!irz401!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Install FreeBSD on EIDE Date: 26 Dec 1995 14:40:22 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 49 Message-ID: <4bp1gm$8q4@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <49a6up$3db@masala.cc.uh.edu> <49jr5n$ili@uriah.heep.sax.de> <Pine.SUN.3.90.951205110117.4640D-100000@hurricane.cs.odu.edu> <4a7kpi$jns@uriah.heep.sax.de> <Pine.SOL.3.91.951212200319.1109A-100000@icarus.cc.uic.edu> <4b9b49$9jc@uriah.heep.sax.de> <Pine.SOL.3.91.951225000218.8687A-100000@icarus.cc.uic.edu> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.3 Rory Imua Lampert <rory@uic.edu> writes: > Hey there, finally someone replied! Joy. Okay, the "neato driver for dos" > says in the book: It will optimze the speed of the drives for the best > possible performance or something of that nature. It supposedly analyzes > the PIO and DMA speeds of the VLB EIDE drives and sets those speeds on > boot up. The drivers are not crucial and everything works fine if I > don't install them. Ok, this won't be in the way for FreeBSD. It doesn't affect the geometry. > Now for the geometry info. All the gemetry for the WD2250 is > fine, 1010cyl 9hd 55sec. Then it gets interesting. The system bios has > the hard dirve geometry settings for the 1gig as 2100cyl 16hd 63sec. > Which is correct. When FreeBSD looks at it, it sees 545cyl 64hd 63sec. > so I changed the geometry info in the partion editor, reinstalled. Same > thing happened as before, the drive just clicked when I tried to boot > FBSD. The on board bios of the card is somehow messing up the geomtry > info after boot up, but there is no way to get a look at what the > on-board bios actually says. Any other ideas? Can you disable the on-board BIOS? IDE drives should run fairly straightforward with any AT-class BIOS, and infact, that's also the way how FreeBSD speaks to the disk. But if there's anything in the way that _doesn't_ look at the drive in the traditional WD1003-way, this might cause problems. You could also try to use the drive on a dumb IDE ``controller'' (i.e., the classic 2 x 74F245 + 1 GAL). Don't be bothered by anybody warning you that you couldn't use the entire drive with it -- with FreeBSD, you can. It's only that your BIOS (and therefore DOS) doesn't see the full drive size, and can only use the first part below the imaginary cylinder 1024, and since FreeBSD needs the BIOS to boot the kernel, FreeBSD's root (``/'') partition must also be there. Everything else, including swap, can be above it in the not-DOS-usable region. The major problem for shared disk usage between DOS/BSD(/Linux) is that all systems must assume the same ``geometry'' for the drive. This is actually only an imagination of a geometry, but you don't have to care for the actual and much more different (non-uniform sector size across the disk surface) drive geometry itself. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)