drives.hlp revision 10882
166131SwpaulIf you are going to actually install some portion of FreeBSD on a 266131Swpauldrive then PLEASE BE VERY CERTAIN that the Geometry reported in the 366131SwpaulPartition Editor (see Installation Menu) is the correct one for your 466131Swpauldrive and controller combination! 566131Swpaul 666131SwpaulIDE drives often have a certain geometry set during the PC BIOS setup, 766131Swpaulor (in the case of larger IDE drives) have their geometry "remapped" 866131Swpaulby either the IDE controller or a special boot-sector translation 966131Swpaulutility such as that by OnTrack Systems. In these cases, knowing the 1066131Swpaulcorrect geometry gets even more complicated as it's not something you 1166131Swpaulcan easily tell by looking at the drive or the PC BIOS setup. The 1266131Swpaulbest way of verifying that your geometry is being correctly calculated 1366131Swpaulin such situations is to boot DOS (from the hard disk, not a floppy!) 1466131Swpauland run the ``pfdisk'' utility provided in the tools/ subdirectory of 1566131Swpaulthe FreeBSD CDROM or FTP site. It will report the geometry that DOS 1666131Swpaulsees, which is generally the correct one. 1766131Swpaul 1866131SwpaulIf you have no DOS partition sharing the disk at all, then you may 1966131Swpaulfind that you have better luck with Geometry detection if you create a 2066131Swpaulvery small DOS partition first, before installing FreeBSD. Once 2166131SwpaulFreeBSD is installed you can always delete it again if you need the 2266131Swpaulspace. 2366131Swpaul 2466131SwpaulIt's actually not a bad idea (believe it or not) to have a small bootable 2566131SwpaulDOS partition on your FreeBSD machine anyway: Should the machine become 2666131Swpaulunstable or exhibit strange behavior at some point in the future (which 2766131Swpaulis not uncommon behavior for PC hardware!) you can then at least use 2866131SwpaulDOS for installing and running one of the commercially available system 2966131Swpauldiagnostic utilities. 3066131Swpaul