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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!news.sdsmt.edu!nntp.uac.net!news.tufts.edu!blanket.mitre.org!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news1.erols.com!newsmaster@erols.com From: Ken Bigelow <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Hard drive configuration during install Date: Wed, 05 Jun 1996 13:17:30 -0700 Organization: Erols Internet Services Lines: 34 Message-ID: <31B5EB5A.60BA@www.play-hookey.com> Reply-To: kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com NNTP-Posting-Host: kenjb05.play-hookey.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0b4 (Win16; I) I have now installed FreeBSD on a number of systems in my home network. My practice is to take a large hard drive, assign a 255 MB DOS partition (actually 255.9, the largest that can be assigned and still keep the clusters down to 4K each). Most of the drives are 1.2 GB, and I just never paid attention to FBSD's asssumptions of disk geometry. The installations went flawlessly. When following this process on a pair of 2 GB drives however, I noticed that the automatic assumptions left 1008 blocks unassigned. Looking further, I found the assumed geometry to be 973 cyl x 64 hd x 63 sec. The physical geometry is 3893 x 16 x 63. Now, when I set the geometry to the physical specs, as listed in CMOS RAM and on the drive itself (Maxtor 72004), installation proceeds correctly, I configure everything, all is accepted, and it reboots. At this point, Boot Manager won't accept F2 to boot FreeBSD -- it just repeats F?. I can hit F1 to boot to DOS, however. Rebooting again produces no change. Installing again, but leaving the 973 x 64 x 63 assumptions in place, the process is again smooth and all goes well, but this time the F2 selection at reboot works. Before somebody asks whether the root partition is below 504 MB, it is. I have 20 MB RAM, and the default slice structure is 32 MB for /, 51 MB for swap, 30 MB for /var, and the rest (1546 MB) for /usr. I always install from the DOS partition, and it works fine. Can anyone tell me why it works when I use the wrong disk geometry, but not when I insert the actual geometry? And can I do something to change this? Thanks for any ideas! Ken