Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 16:57:40 -0800 () From: Rick Hamell <hamellr@dsinw.com> To: Darren Pilgrim <dpilgrim@uswest.net> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Disk geometry question. Message-ID: <Pine.WNT.3.95.990402165143.-4077559A-100000@bb-b1-11a> In-Reply-To: <37055859.E945BB40@uswest.net>
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> [this should be sent to -questions] Forwarded... > > I know I have a disk geometry problem because I get the "Missing Operating > > System" message. How do you know that? :) > > Even though I am using an ADAPTEC controller which has its own bios. Am I > > still contrained by some parameters? > > Eg. Boot partition within 1024 cylinders. > > 64 sector max. > > 17 head max. > > or anyting like that? > > IIRC, unless your 486's main BIOS has a setting for SCSI disks, the > entry it has doesn't effect the geometry for the SCSI drives; the SCSI > controller takes care of this for you. OTOH, that space loss you see > could just be a misscalculation, it happens. Besides, you're only > losing 5MB out of 1GB, does it really matter that much to you? SCSI dosen't need any BIOS settings anyways. The number of heads, and sectors and such is a unique IDE thing. The space loss is not a big deal. What happens is that FreeBSD reads the drive directly to see what the settings should be. The settings in BIOS could be slightly different, giving you slightly less, or slightly more space. Usually you should expect to be off by about 5% of your total hard drive space. For instance I've got a 120 Meg IDE drive in one computer that is reported at 112 in Dos, 121 in the BIOS, FreeBSD thinks it's 115 megs. As to your orginal problem, set your hard drive settings to none in your BIOS first... I think you'll see your SCSI hard drive boot a little better since it's currently looking for an IDE drive. Rick To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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