[ale] Closure - Re: [ale] Back to the Future!

[John Mills]

On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, David S. Jackson wrote:

> Excellent!  Congrats!  

Well, thanks - except that I also decided I should redo this with the
current [4.5] release before I put too much effort into installation and
configuration. That's the kind of decision that convinces me I really
_must_ be a very sick puppy!

> I'm wondering if there's a special bug in your bios or a feature
> needed for freebsd so this non-drive recognition doesn't happen
> to others.  What do you think?

Since I picked the box out of curbside trash, I am happy that it even
_finds_ its disks. I thought that BIOS auto-detection basically took
whatever the interface on the drive chose to tell it. Apparently it can
access the sectors differently, depending on the geometry assumed by the
BIOS.

> Maybe I'm out to lunch, but doesn't linux recognize the drive
> geometry even if the bios doesn't get it right?  Seems like
> Freebsd should be capable of that too.

Apparently the mapping FreeBSD uses to lay down a boot record _can_ be
different than the mapping when it's read by the BIOS, unless they assumed
the same geometry. I thought the on-board interface would override this,
but not in the case of my drives and MoBo. "Live and live", they say ...

 - John Mills


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