Missing Docs in 7.0?

Robert Nestor rnestor at mac.com
Sun Apr 20 16:16:03 UTC 2008


While attempting to install 7.0 on a system, the Disk Partition  
Editor complains that the disk geometry isn't correct and refers the  
user to the Hardware Guide in the Docs for information about setting  
the correct geometry.  There doesn't appear to be anything in the  
Hardware Guide that addresses this issue.

Details follow:
While sysinstall and the Disk Partition Editor defaults to a geometry  
that works for the installation, even on a system with multiple disk  
partitions, it doesn't allow the user to over-ride these settings.   
The values used by sysinstall do work for the installation but they  
appear to hose QEMU if one tries to boot a virtual system from a real  
disk partition.  In my case sysinstall reports 24321/255/63, ide_conf  
reports 16643/255/63 from the BIOS and 16383/16/63 from the  
Controller, and pfdisk reports 1024/255/63 for the disk.  The disk is  
a 200Gig disk with three partitions, one for Windows, one for FreeBSD  
and one for Linux.  There isn't a 137Gig limitation in my BIOS since  
I've updated it and all three partitions are bootable and runnable in  
hardware (using GAG for a Boot Manager).  They are unusable with QEMU  
with FreeBSD as a host, but work with QMEU running under Windows-XP  
(installed in the first partition).

Clearly things have improved in FreeBSD 7.0 since the system will  
successfully install and run in spite of this Disk Geometry Hell, but  
it comes at a price!

Thanks,



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