Date: Mon, 19 Jun 1995 12:35:20 -0500 From: "Brian R. Toonen" <toonen@mcs.anl.gov> To: questions@freebsd.org Cc: toonen@antares.mcs.anl.gov Subject: drive translation problems Message-ID: <199506191735.MAA11435@antares.mcs.anl.gov>
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I recently attempted to upgrade my 486 box from 1.1.5.1 to 2.0.5, only to find that the FreeBSD install program and my Micropolis 2112A drive don't seem to like each either :(. The Micropolis 2112A is one of those drives that does not identify itself and therefore makes FreeBSD "guess" at what the geometry might be. Untranslated, the drive's geometry is 2034 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors. I am not certain if the drive has a translated mode or what the geometry would be if it does. As you know, the bios is incapable of reporting more than 1024 cylinders. So, when FreeBSD boots, it obtains 1024C, 16H, 63S as the geometry from the bios. In the past, I have told FreeBSD that the drive had 2034 cylinders and the install process accepted this as the truth. FreeBSD would complain at boot time that it could not obtain the parameters from the drive, but it seemed to get them from the disklabel that was written during the install. All was well. Attempting to specify the geometry (2034/16/63) with 'G' option of fdisk under 2.0.5, seems to have no affect. The ending block of the free space remains at 1032191 rather increasing to 2050271. Any attempt to allocate space beyond cylinder 1024 is ignored. I have also attempted to use pfdisk under DOS, specifying a partition extending to cylinder 2033 with an id of 165 (FreeBSD) and then firing up the FreeBSD install disk. This partition seems to be ignored entirely by the install fdisk program and the space is still listed as free space extending only through cylinder 1023. The IDE adapter in this machine does has the ability to do remapping, but it appears to do so only at the bios level. This works fine for DOS since I can turn on remapping and specify 1017C, 32H, 63S. However, this type of remapping does not seem to work for FreeBSD (not surprising since FreeBSD directly manipulates the device rather than using the bios). At the moment, I am only able to use 504MB of my drive with FreeBSD. If anyone has any suggestions on how to inform FreeBSD that the remaining 1010 cylinders exist, I would greatly appreciate it. Brian Toonen toonen@mcs.anl.gov
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