POS system trashing hard drives during install

[John McDonnell]

I just downloaded and booted from the NetBSD install disk and was presented with a screen I haven't seen in FreeBSD in some time. NetBSD was unable to match my hard drive to one detected by the BIOS. I remember when pretty much every install of FreeBSD would prompt me with that message about the reported geometry not matching. I can't recall why the prompt no longer shows up in FreeBSD, but perhaps it could be behind the issues I'm having?

For comparision, here is what I have found about the geometry:

NetBSD reports:
Cylinders:   1023
Heads:           255
Sectors:           63

The BIOS by default is set to autodetect the mode for the hard drive and reports these settings:
Cylinders:   19158
Heads:                16
Sectors:            255

Capacity: 40022MB

Changing to CHS mode gives the same results.
Changing to LBA mode reports:
Cylinders:   4865
Heads:           255
Sectors:           63

Capacity: 40018 MB

And last, changing to LARGE reports:
Cylinders:   1277
Heads:           240
Sectors:         155

Capacity: 40016 MB

Obviously none of these match what NetBSD is reporting. I then told the system to accept NetBSD's recommendation of the geometry for the hard drive and did an install. Upon reboot, I had no issues and booted right into NetBSD. So it seems that NetBSD, Linux and Windows all have no issues on this machine but whatever FreeBSD is doing with hard drives is the issue.

While NetBSD or Linux are suitable solutions, I really would prefer FreeBSD. Does anyone have any insight into what to try next? I don't mind doing a completely manual install from the shell if needed, though it has been a while since I've done that. I usually use the installer for as much as possible to simplify the process and only drop to a shell for possibly hard drive set up and tossing some things into /boot/loader.conf when finished.

Thank you once again for your time.

-- 
John McDonnell
mcdonnjd at pcam.org