Re: Using 'incorrect' HD geometry.
Hi, I'm using win2k an freebsd 6.0 on my laptop too, and I've been reinstalling freebsd pretty often (I'm still tring my way to have it working, so I started with 5.4 and than moved to 4.11 and 6.0) without ever changing my win partition. As you say, I'm always prompted about incorrect geometry, I hit ok and go on, than fdisk show me something like the one you got, with ad0s1 as my win (NTFS) partition and ad0s2 as my freebsd partition. All I do at this rate is to set my ad0s1 to be my active partition (I boot both from the win 2000 booter) than I go ahead leaving the MBR as is and install freebsd in freebsd partition. Unfortunately I've never been able to keep the /usr label as is (I always delete them all and start from a auto layout), and I can't help you if you're willing to keep their data safe. I got this article as model when I first did it: http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2004/10/dual-boot-freebsd-5.html My windows partition was out of order only once, when I forgot to set it bootable, but this is because I actually boot both OS from it: I went back to fdisk, fixed it and got my windows working with no problem. I can't tell you to go ahed with no backup... but I can say your win partition is pretty safe with freebsd fdisk. Regards Lila John Murphy ha scritto: If I just immediately 'Q'uit the darned thing will it not make any changes to global drive geometry? It would probably take me several days to get my win2k installation back to how it is now, if I lost it. All I really want is for the installer to use the freebsd slice as is. I'm tempted to just try UPGRADING but mergemaster always confuses me. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Using 'incorrect' HD geometry.
Thanks Lila, your success encouraged me to try and you were quite right that your win partition is pretty safe with freebsd fdisk. Unfortunately the install failed saying: Write failure on transfer! (wrote 77187 bytes of 1425408 bytes) And loads of errors like the following were shown on the Alt F2 screen: /stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error /stand/cpio: warning: skipped 723757 bytes of junk /stand/cpio: : No such file or directory /stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error /stand/cpio: warning: skipped 4096 bytes of junk /stand/cpio: : No such file or directory [...] acd0: FAILURE - READ_BIG HARDWARE ERROR asc=0x08 ascq=0x03 error=0 I tried leaving the partitions (within the ad0s2 slice) as they were first. Then I tried 'Auto defaults for all' and lastly some partition sizes of my own. I even tried installing 5.3 which only managed to write -1 bytes. Which is odd because it must have worked before. Presumably I would need to change the drive geometry in fdisk to the figures which the BIOS indicates. Any one know the implications of doing so for the non bsd slices? Thanks again. -- John. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Using 'incorrect' HD geometry.
Write failure on transfer! (wrote 77187 bytes of 1425408 bytes) When I got this error message during install it mean the hard drive had a bad spot on it. This had nothing to do with the hd geometry used. Bet your hd is udma 33. Think this is a bug in fbsd since 4.11 where this problem did not occur. I think since 5.x the udma 33 ata driver does not handle the bad track pointer to the reassigned track. Or all the hd alt tracks have been used up all ready. What I did was to allocate an very small unused partition that included that area and then allocated the remainder of the hd to the slice I installed fbsd in. My suggestion is this is first sign your hd is going bad, replace now, and backup your data to other hd. good luck. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of John Murphy Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2006 10:28 AM To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Using 'incorrect' HD geometry. Thanks Lila, your success encouraged me to try and you were quite right that your win partition is pretty safe with freebsd fdisk. Unfortunately the install failed saying: Write failure on transfer! (wrote 77187 bytes of 1425408 bytes) And loads of errors like the following were shown on the Alt F2 screen: /stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error /stand/cpio: warning: skipped 723757 bytes of junk /stand/cpio: : No such file or directory /stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error /stand/cpio: warning: skipped 4096 bytes of junk /stand/cpio: : No such file or directory [...] acd0: FAILURE - READ_BIG HARDWARE ERROR asc=0x08 ascq=0x03 error=0 I tried leaving the partitions (within the ad0s2 slice) as they were first. Then I tried 'Auto defaults for all' and lastly some partition sizes of my own. I even tried installing 5.3 which only managed to write -1 bytes. Which is odd because it must have worked before. Presumably I would need to change the drive geometry in fdisk to the figures which the BIOS indicates. Any one know the implications of doing so for the non bsd slices? Thanks again. -- John. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Using 'incorrect' HD geometry.
fbsd_user [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Write failure on transfer! (wrote 77187 bytes of 1425408 bytes) When I got this error message during install it mean the hard drive had a bad spot on it. This had nothing to do with the hd geometry used. Bet your hd is udma 33. Think this is a bug in fbsd since 4.11 where this problem did not occur. I think since 5.x the udma 33 ata driver does not handle the bad track pointer to the reassigned track. Or all the hd alt tracks have been used up all ready. Thanks for the suggestion. I'm fairly sure the hd is ok and it's udma66 at least. Actually I've had some success just now. There was that error message in the Alt F2 screen output saying: acd0: FAILURE - READ_BIG HARDWARE ERROR asc=0x08 ascq=0x03 error=0 I didn't think it was particularly important as the Alt F1 screen was saying write failure, but I decided to try an (minimal) FTP install and it actually completed with absolutely no write errors! It doesn't boot, probably due to a warning I ignored that it was using the existing /dev (as the partition existed). I'll try it again after tea and insist on a new set of partitions, which I believe will cure that problem. I'm so happy to be getting there! Many thanks to all for the help. What I did was to allocate an very small unused partition that included that area and then allocated the remainder of the hd to the slice I installed fbsd in. Hah! I've done that with a 40G laptop drive I was given, which had loads of bad sectors. But there's a good 35GB on it running 6.0 :) -- John. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Using 'incorrect' HD geometry.
Mr J. Happy Chappy here, just noting a few observations: Jerry McAllister's and Lila's suggestions were quite right that the installer's fdisk would not affect the other partitions on the HD if it's allowed to just do its thing. Its interpretation of the geometry was entirely useful. Reinstalling (via FTP) and changing the partitions in the disklabel editor prevented the warning about using existing /dev but didn't make the fresh install boot. Had to reconfigure the boot manager (Ranish Partition Manager's smallest configuration) simply by saving it. I moved its 'active' partition from the FreeBSD slice to the win2k one, but I don't think that was what did it. As I had only done a minimal install, I tried installing the man pages from the disk and DVD drive I had initially tried to install from, and saw loads of similar read/write errors. The drive works flawlessly under windows and the disk is 'known good' as I have used it previously on other hardware. In fact; I was able to install the man pages from the same disk in another drive on the same PC: acd0: DVDR PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-108/1.14 at ata1-master UDMA66 acd1: CDRW LITE-ON LTR-24103S/XB03 at ata1-slave UDMA33 Those drives are connected to the motherboard with a standard 40 conductor cable, not a proper 80 conductor one. I'll replace that soon and follow up to this message if it prevents the r/w errors. I'm expecting that to be the most likely cause :) Lastly (sorry for the verbosity), after the first successful run of the newly installed 6.0 and the tweak of the boot manager, when I ran the win2k installation it brought up an explorer window showing the contents of the e: virtual drive (the last one on the first HD) and a message box exclaiming that windows had finished installing my new hardware and the system needed to be re-booted. I did so and all's well that ends well... Xorg, nVidia drivers and KDE next. Thanks for reading. -- John. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Using 'incorrect' HD geometry.
On Thu, 16 Mar 2006, John Murphy wrote: Thanks Lila, your success encouraged me to try and you were quite right that your win partition is pretty safe with freebsd fdisk. Unfortunately the install failed saying: Write failure on transfer! (wrote 77187 bytes of 1425408 bytes) And loads of errors like the following were shown on the Alt F2 screen: /stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error /stand/cpio: warning: skipped 723757 bytes of junk /stand/cpio: : No such file or directory /stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error /stand/cpio: warning: skipped 4096 bytes of junk /stand/cpio: : No such file or directory [...] acd0: FAILURE - READ_BIG HARDWARE ERROR asc=0x08 ascq=0x03 error=0 I tried leaving the partitions (within the ad0s2 slice) as they were first. Then I tried 'Auto defaults for all' and lastly some partition sizes of my own. I even tried installing 5.3 which only managed to write -1 bytes. Which is odd because it must have worked before. Presumably I would need to change the drive geometry in fdisk to the figures which the BIOS indicates. Any one know the implications of doing so for the non bsd slices? Thanks again. -- John. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] John, I had a similar problem while installing FreeBSD on an old HP NetServer. It looked like a hard disk problem but it turned out to be the CD drive could not read the install CD very well. Changed CD drives and everything was fine. The message about write failure I guess is due to layers of scripting not being able to pass back enough information. Jon ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Using 'incorrect' HD geometry.
Jerry McAllister [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Nowdays, the geometry on the drives seems to be 'virtual' and so you should just let the installer/fdisk do what it wants and leave it that way. If it doesn't work the way the installer wants to then there may be a problem. But if it works, just ignore the warnings. Thanks Jerry. I'm so paranoid about messing up the other OS on the HD though. The installer's fdisk suggests an entirely different layout to everything else I've seen: Geometry 9729/255/63 = 156296385 sectors (76316 MB) Offset Size(ST) EndName PType DescSubtype Flags 0 63 62 - 12 unused 0 6359812205981282 ad0s1 7 fat 11 5981283 13971447 19952729 ad0s2 8 freebsd 165 19952730 5670 19958399 - 12 unused 0 19958400 136337040 156295439 ad0s3 4 extended DOS, LBA 15 156295440 6048 156301487 - 12 unused 0 If I just immediately 'Q'uit the darned thing will it not make any changes to global drive geometry? It would probably take me several days to get my win2k installation back to how it is now, if I lost it. All I really want is for the installer to use the freebsd slice as is. I'm tempted to just try UPGRADING but mergemaster always confuses me. -- John. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Using 'incorrect' HD geometry.
I'm currently dual booting FreeBSD-5.3 and Windows 2000 on a WD800BB 80GB IDE HD. It all seems to be working very well, but now I want to install 6.0 on the slice where 5.3 is. fdisk -s currently says: Nowdays, the geometry on the drives seems to be 'virtual' and so you should just let the installer/fdisk do what it wants and leave it that way. If it doesn't work the way the installer wants to then there may be a problem. But if it works, just ignore the warnings. jerry /dev/ad0: 155061 cyl 16 hd 63 sec Part Start Size Type Flags 1:635981220 0x0b 0x00 2: 5981283 13971447 0xa5 0x80 3: 19958400 136337040 0x0f 0x00 The problem is that the installer says that geometry of 155061/16/63 is incorrect and suggests using the BIOS geometry of 38309/16/255. I'm worried that if I change the geometry I may lose the existing Win2k slices (1 and 3 in the fdisk output). I'm not even convinced that what the BIOS says is correct, as I get the following from other sources: 16383/16/63 from the Western Digital web site. 10337/240/63 probed values from Scisoft Sandra. 10337/240/63 Ranish Partition Manager. If I make sure the installer uses the existing incorrect geometry, does that guarantee that the other slices will be unaffected? What future problems may that lead to? -- John. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
