*BSD News Article 66974


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From: jsloan@LiveNet.Net (Jim Sloan)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Invalid Partition Table
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 96 05:28:08 GMT
Organization: LiveNet, Inc.
Lines: 52
Message-ID: <4ln2hl$kjo@PaperBoy.LiveNet.Net>
References: <4lb5dh$kuo@paperboy.livenet.net> <4lf930$hmg@uriah.heep.sax.de>
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In article <4lf930$hmg@uriah.heep.sax.de>, joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) wrote:
>jsloan@LiveNet.Net (Jim Sloan) writes:
>>I just recently installed FreeBSD 2.1 on a 3 gig ST 43400N.  The drive 
>>geometry that FreeBSD wanted to use didn't match the specs on the drive, nor 
>>would it accept the correct geometry (99 SPT, 21 Heads, 2735 cylinders, 
>>FreeBSD wanted to use 2777 tracks, 64 heads, 27 SPT).  I set the drive up as 
>>42 heads 50 SPT, 2735 tracks, and it accepted it.
>
>I'm sounding like a broken record here:
>
>The drive's real geometry is irrelevant.  Use the BIOS geometry.
>The drive's real geometry is irrelevant.  Use the BIOS geometry.
>The drive's real geometry is irrelevant.  Use the BIOS geometry.
>....

Excuse me? but when I installed FreeBSD it was saying the geometry was 
invalid.  I had FreeBSD installed on this once before, and it worked, and 
after I decided to reinstall it, did it not work.  Same settings as I had the 
first time, only thing I did different was how I partitioned the drive.

>
>(The drive's real geometry usually doesn't even have a uniform number
>of sectors per track across the surface, so it cannot be expressed as
>a straight C/H/S value anyway.)
>
>>If anyone has any suggestions on how to fix this without losing the data I 
>>currently have on the drive, I would appreciate it.
>
>Run fdisk, and tweak the C/H/S values of the slice start so they match
>the relative sector number of the slice start, in terms of the BIOS
>geometry.  Be careful.
>
And how do I determine this?  Excuse me if I sound like an idiot, but, I asked 
because I didn't know how to fix it, if I did know how to do this, I wouldn't 
have asked.

>-- 
>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. ;-)
>

------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jim Sloan                        jsloan@livenet.net
 Vice President
 LiveNet, Inc.                         
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