I downloaded the three floppy images for 5.3-RELEASE and dd'ed them on the disks. Then I booted the installation and tried to partition my hard drive. To my surprise, the partition table shown by the installation was complete nonsense. I figured it probably had something to do with the fact that my BIOS doesn't support the disk size. I'm using the OnTrack disk manager to fix the problem for Windows. So I booted from the disk, and used the OnTrack feature to boot from a floppy after OnTrack has been loaded. The partition table was exactly the same junk, though. I also tried different geometries (reported by LILO, BIOS, FreeBSD installation, etc.), but this didn't change the view of the partition table either.
I was able to install FreeBSD 5.2 on a machine of this generation that didn't support large partitions either, but it wasn't easy. Windows-based workarounds like OnTrack won't work.
The trick I used was to make a primary bootable partition on the hard drive that fit within the size limitations that the BIOS could natively understand. (I don't have that number in front of me right now, I'm sorry.) Put the parts of FreeBSD that you need to boot in this partition and boot from it. Once FreeBSD boots, it's able to support large partitions that your old BIOS can't understand, so you can mount the rest of your hard drive, no matter how large it is.
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