From nobody  Mon Oct 13 17:50:44 1997
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Date: Mon, 13 Oct 1997 17:50:44 -0700 (PDT)
From: brennan@merk.com
To: freebsd-gnats-submit@freebsd.org
Subject: Weird disk geometry selected in "custom" installation
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>Number:         4756
>Category:       misc
>Synopsis:       Weird disk geometry selected in "custom" installation
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs
>State:          closed
>Quarter:
>Keywords:
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Mon Oct 13 18:00:00 PDT 1997
>Closed-Date:    Sat Oct 18 13:50:12 MEST 1997
>Last-Modified:  Sat Oct 18 13:52:38 MEST 1997
>Originator:     Rich Brennan
>Release:        2.2.2
>Organization:
>Environment:
Not installed yet
>Description:
When choosing to do a custom installation, when I was presented with
the FDISK menu, I received a really weird dis geometry for my SCSI
disk: 1028 cyls, 255 heads, 63(?) sectors per track, giving me
an 8 gig drive. The drive is a micropolis 1528, adaptec controller.
The real geometry is 2100 cyls, 15 heads, 84 sectors/track. I tried
to enter the value, but the fdisk program insisted I was completely
whacked out. I tried several times, always with the same situation.
I finally gave up and tried the "novice" installation. Oddly enough,
the fdisk program sensed the appropriate geometry, and I was able to
fdisk and partition the drive with no problem. I'm now installing
from CDROM.

Note: when I was getting the bad geometries, during the boot I saw
the correct geometry printed out by the driver, so I know something
knew the correct disk geometry. It seems that fdisk was the weird
one....

>How-To-Repeat:

>Fix:

>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
State-Changed-From-To: open->closed 
State-Changed-By: joerg 
State-Changed-When: Sat Oct 18 13:50:12 MEST 1997 
State-Changed-Why:  

So-called `real' geometries (*) are irrelevant to FreeBSD's 
installation program; the BIOS geometry is relevant, and what you're 
presenting as your `bogus' figures looks awfully reasonable as a BIOS 
geometry, much unlike the other figures. 

(*) Real geometries of today's disks cannot be expressed with a 
uniform number of sectors per track, they are something like ``2100 
cylinders, 15 heads, and between 50 and 100 sectors per track'' (for 
example). 
>Unformatted:
