FDisk won't detect or accept correct disk geometry from BIOS

[Keith Kelly]

Inline.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Charles Swiger" <cswiger at mac.com>
To: "Keith Kelly" <c0d3h4x0r at hotmail.com>
Cc: "freebsd-questions ORG" <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2004 3:27 PM
Subject: Re: FDisk won't detect or accept correct disk geometry from BIOS


> On Jan 22, 2004, at 6:04 PM, Keith Kelly wrote:
> > The motherboard is not old.  It is an MSI KT4 Ultra motherboard, if I
> > remember the model number correctly off the top of my head, for the
> > Athlon
> > XP architecture.  The BIOS doesn't even explicitly list what mode
> > (LBA, CHS,
> > extended CHS) it is using to address the drive -- I just set it to
> > "Auto",
> > it detects the device name, and fills out a small listing telling me
> > the
> > C/H/S geometry it is using.  The motherboard is already running the
> > latest
> > available BIOS update from MSI.
>
> OK, but if the auto mode uses the wrong C/H/S translation, this default
> may be the source of your problem.  What happens when you switch from
> using "auto" to explicitly using "LBA"?

I don't know.  I've never had to change away from "Auto" to get any other OS 
to install or boot from any of my hard drives, though, so I really doubt 
that is the problem.  I'm quite confident the problem must lie with FreeBSD 
itself, in the form of a bug or a lack of hardware support.  Although my 
integrated IDE controller and all other basic hardware is on the FreeBSD 
supported hardware list.


>
> [ ... ]
> > I definitely do not have hardware issues, because Linux, Windows XP,
> > Windows
> > 2000, BeOS, and SkyOS have all worked fine at various points, and
> > Windows XP
> > continues to work fine :-)
>
> Your error message reflects a BIOS-level failure to find a bootable
> partition.
>
> Do you already have a bootable partition on the system, and are trying
> to install FreeBSD in a second partition?  If so, which partition is
> marked active?

No.  The hard drive is the only hard drive attached (I detached my two other 
drives with WinXP and data files on them, so they couldn't get inadvertently 
hosed during installation... those two devices were on the primary IDE 
chain.  I moved the blank hard drive and the CD-ROM drive, which were on the 
secondary IDE chain, onto the primary IDE chain to try to get FreeBSD 
installed that way.  There's currently nothing on the secondary IDE chain). 
And, I did ensure in all my attempts that I marked the single full-disk 
slice I created with fdisk as bootable.

>
> -- 
> -Chuck
>
>