Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2007 06:31:37 -0600 From: CyberLeo Kitsana <cyberleo@cyberleo.net> To: Christoper Tucker <tucker@claw.ees.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD, 160GB HD, and a Bios limitation Message-ID: <47442529.5030906@cyberleo.net> In-Reply-To: <20071120015346.S86095@claw.ees.com> References: <20071120015346.S86095@claw.ees.com>
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Christoper Tucker wrote: > I used the "all" command here. Using the Seagate utility, the drive had > earlier been set to 160GB, yet the installer sees 120GB here, it seems. The IDE interface that the drive is connected to does not support LBA48 addressing, and thus can only address 2^28 sectors, or about 120GiB. As the higher sectors cannot be addressed, they essentially do not exist. I'm doubtful there are any software workarounds for this issue. As for the size reported in the BIOS, that's only required to get the system booted, and all boot files must reside within that space. Once the FreeBSD kernel takes over, it communicates with the IDE interface directly, and is not subject to BIOS limitations. The biggest concern is that, when the boot sector and partition information is written, the geometry fdisk uses must match that which the BIOS expects. If not, it's possible that the bootloader, which must use BIOS calls to access the disk, will end up looking in the wrong places. It might be easier to simply procure a cheap, recent Promise or similar bootable PCI IDE adapter, which will not suffer these limitations, and will likely be faster than the onboard adapter. -- Fuzzy love, -CyberLeo Technical Administrator CyberLeo.Net Webhosting http://www.CyberLeo.Net <CyberLeo@CyberLeo.Net> Furry Peace! - http://wwww.fur.com/peace/
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