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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