30 lines
1.6 KiB
Plaintext
30 lines
1.6 KiB
Plaintext
If you are going to actually install some portion of FreeBSD on a
|
|
drive then PLEASE BE VERY CERTAIN that the Geometry reported in the
|
|
Partition Editor is the correct one for your drive and controller
|
|
combination!
|
|
|
|
IDE drives often have a certain geometry set during the PC BIOS setup,
|
|
or (in the case of larger IDE drives) have their geometry "remapped"
|
|
by either the IDE controller or a special boot-sector translation
|
|
utility such as that by OnTrack Systems. In these cases, knowing the
|
|
correct geometry gets even more complicated as it's not something you
|
|
can easily tell by looking at the drive or the PC BIOS setup. The
|
|
best way of verifying that your geometry is being correctly calculated
|
|
in such situations is to boot DOS (from the hard disk, not a floppy!)
|
|
and run the ``pfdisk'' utility provided in the tools/ subdirectory of
|
|
the FreeBSD CDROM or FTP site. It will report the geometry that DOS
|
|
sees, which is generally the correct one.
|
|
|
|
If you have no DOS partition sharing the disk at all, then you may
|
|
find that you have better luck with Geometry detection if you create a
|
|
very small DOS partition first, before installing FreeBSD. Once
|
|
FreeBSD is installed you can always delete it again if you need the
|
|
space.
|
|
|
|
It's actually not a bad idea (believe it or not) to have a small bootable
|
|
DOS partition on your FreeBSD machine anyway: Should the machine become
|
|
unstable or exhibit strange behavior at some point in the future (which
|
|
is not uncommon behavior for PC hardware!) you can then at least use
|
|
DOS for installing and running one of the commercially available system
|
|
diagnostic utilities.
|