Unable to install on large hard drive

[Mike Jeays]

On Fri, 2005-11-25 at 23:35 -0800, Christopher Kelley wrote:
> Up until now, I've installed FreeBSD on smaller drives (< 15 gig), but I 
> recently had to replace the HD in my windows machine, so I got a larger 
> hard drive with the idea of installing fBSD on it as well and dual 
> booting that machine.
> 
> The motherboard is an Asus A7V133, and the hard drive is a Maxtor 
> 4D040H2 40 gig HD.  The motherboard supports LBA, so I'm led to believe 
> (though googling) that the HD size isn't a problem. fBSD correctly 
> recognizes the HD when booting. I am attempting to install FreeBSD 
> 6.0-Release, I haven't tried any of the 5.x versions to see if the 
> results are the same.
> 
> I have a small partition for the windows system that is 5 gig, a large 
> partition for programs and data that is 18 gig, and around 15 gig left 
> for fBSD.  The installer squawks about the drive geometry, and says it 
> will use a more sane geometry.  I set up the slices and it doesn't 
> squawk about writing them, and then attempts to install the system.  I 
> immediately get an error "Write failure on transfer!" and it can't seem 
> to write anything to the drive.
> 
> The good news is, it isn't harming my windows partitions.  I can easily 
> boot back into windows and everything there works.
> 
> I did look through the manual and searched a bit on google, but I'm not 
> having much luck finding even suggestions of what to try.  Does anyone 
> have any suggestions?
> 
> Christopher
> 
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I reported a similar problem with a Maxtor D740X-SL 40GB drive a few
weeks ago.  I cannot get this drive to work properly with recent
versions of FreeBSD, and get the same error during installation.  The
disk seems to work fine with Fedora and Ubuntu.  I made it work by
disabling DMA, but the performance was awful.  My motherboard is an ASUS
P4S533.