Subject: 4.1.1 sees IBM 30Gb IDE disk geometry wrong.
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 08:38:22 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: AIT - CSIM program
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.misc
Dear fellow FreeBSD'ers,
I've been pulling my hair out trying to install 4.1.1 on an IBM PC 300
system with two IDE disks: one 10Gb (master) and one 20Gb IBM
DLTA-305020 (slave).
Everything works OK for the base installation on the 10Gb disk.
Trouble begins when I want to partition the 20Gb disk: FreeBSD sees it
as a 2Gb disk with geometry = 4096/16/63. I tried to use 'g' to force
disk geometry in the partition editor, but it would revert back to the
geometry it has detected and not let me create any partition bigger
that 2Gb anyway.
The host PC is a brand new IBM PC model 300 (model number 70T). Its
BIOS setup gives no control over things like disk geometry, LBA
mode...
The disk label says:
Capacity = 20.5 Gb, 40.188.960 blocks, geometry = 16383/16/63
What I have tried so far:
1) use Windows 98 boot disk: OK, can FDISK, FORMAT 20Gb partition
2) boot Linux Slackware 7.0 disks: OK, can fdisk and mke2fs 20Gb
partition
3) think and think and think and browse though FreeBSD archives: it
seems that other people have seen similar problems, mostly with 3.x,
and that the miracle cure was to force LBA mode using "flags
0xb0ffb0ff" on the wdc0 config line. Tried to find a similar option
for the ata driver: does not exist or is not documented anywhere, even
in the source code (at least not visible to me)
4) try to overwrite the first blocks of the disk with zeroes in case
some bad partitition table in MBR confuses FreeBSD: no way
5) boot 3.5.1 kern+mfsroot disks forcing the flags mentioned in (3)
above at boot time: OK! can see the 20Gb, partition, newfs...
6) in despair, built a 4.1.1 kernel with ata driver disabled and using
old wd driver with above flags: OK! Disk is now seen with geometry =
2501/255/63 (same as Linux sees it) with LBA mode.
Is this bug in the new ata driver ? the PC's BIOS ? both ? is there a
workaround for this using the new ata driver or am I stuck using the
old wdc driver ?
Thanks in advance for any help,
_Alain_
cscoms.net>
--
Alain FAUCONNET
Sr. System Administrator
CS Internet Co. Ltd. (Shin Corp) - Thailand