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Date:      Sat, 8 Jul 1995 11:17:17 -0700
From:      patl@asimov.lashley.slip.netcom.com
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Seagate Hawk -vs- 2.0.5 install
Message-ID:  <9507081817.AA03891@lashley.slip.netcom.com>

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I'm having some problems installing 2.0.5 from CD-ROM.  Actually, I
think it is -a- problem.  I haven't been able to find anything helpful
in the Web pages or email archives.  (The answer may well be there,
but I haven't been able to find it...)

The install goes fine, right up to the point of the reboot.  Then it hangs
in the boot manager prompt.  I'm more than willing to believe this is the
classic wrong-geometry problem; but I'm having some trouble determining
what the right geometry should be.  (The alternative is that I finally
have a good geometry, but there is some subtlty of slicing/partitioning
that I have wrong.)

The platform is an ASUS PCI-486SP3G with a Seagate ST15230N 'Hawk'
4.3G SCSI disk.  This is a virgin system, and I have no intention
of ever running any other OS on it.  The disk docs list a geometry
of 3995/19/???.  During my first install attempt, the Partition
menu listed 4012/19/110 (which does work out to the right size.)
But it also kept popping up the 'wrong geometry' warning.  Later
install attempts listed 4995/19/46 (which also works out to the
right size.)  Keeping that geometry avoids the warnings.

At first, I tried making the entire disk a single slice.  (Which
actually made a one track unused slice, a huge FreeBSD slice, and
a 704 block unused slice...)  When this didn't work, I thought
perhaps the boot manager was suffering from the 1024-cylinder
restriction, so I made a 500M slice and a ~3500M slice.  Still no
luck.

Any concrete advice would be appreciated.  (Note that I belong to
the the-fewer-partitions-the-better school.)


**** Late breaking news. ****
This message was delayed long enough for me to try another experiment.
When I get the bootblock from the floppy, but manually specify
hd(0,a)/kernel, it boots fine.  I tried 'disklabel -B sd0', but
it doesn't seem to have helped.  I now suspect that I need to replace
the MBR, but can't find any docs on how to do that...


Thanks,
-Pat

My opinions are my own.  For a small royalty, they can be yours as well...
Pat Lashley, Senior Software Engineer, Henry Davis Consulting
1098 Lynn, Sunnyvale, CA 94087	||  408/720-9039  ||  lashley@netcom.com



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