Hi all,
I've got a problem with a couple of machines... The first time I saw the
problem, I thought it was my hardware, but now I've encountered the problem
on three different systems, all with different motherboards, and hard
disks. The only think in common, is that with all of them I'm working with
FreeBSD 3.4, and that all the disks are LARGER than 12Gb IDE's.
This is a commom problem.
One of the things that I notice are that the size of the disk that gets
reported by the BIOS, and FreeBSD are totally different... As an example,
the following system reports:-
wdc0: unit 0 (wd0): ST313021A
wd0: 12419MB (25434228 sectors), 25232 cyls, 16 heads, 63 S/T, 512 B/S
from dmesg
yet, when I get the system BIOS to probe the disk, it reports:-
24062 cyls
16 heads
63 sects.
As you can see, FreeBSD recognizes the disk as larger than what it actually
is. I've found that if I partition the disk using the entire disk (fdisk
-e wd0), then the last partition on the disk (the one that uses the last
sectors on the disk) won't be newfs'd...
It's not at all good. sysinstall also seems to have a problem with
allowing you to set the geometry. I'd expect that if I set the geometry to
what the BIOS detects, and then say to use the entire disk, that it would
use that defined geometry. It doesn't... The moment you say to use the
entire disk, ('A', No), it resets the geometry to something it likes. If I
calculate the number of sectors manually (to what the bios detects), and
then create a slice all things work fine within that slice.
Yep.. Seen this happen
I think there is something wrong with the way that FreeBSD is detecting the
size of the disk. (Interigating the disk that is...) So far I've only had
this problem with IDE disks.
I have had a machine that the bios picks up the drive as one thing, the
BSD probe picks it up as another, the sysinstall picks that as another.
But the one thing that was weird was that the geometry on the drive said
another size yet.
What you want to do in the sysinstall is pick "A" like you did and choose
to use the entire disk like before. Then after that, you want to set the
geometry according to what it says on the hard drive. If you don't have
that, look it up on the web. This will keep your partition and the new
drive geometry.
Remember, FreeBSD doesn't care what the bios says
Warren
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Jason Seidel [Systems Administrator]
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