[BUGA] Installing FreeBSD on a big disk.

[David Bullock]

Hi FreeBSD'ers.

I just got myself a new 200GB seagate ST3200826A (an ATA drive), and am 
trying to install FreeBSD 5.4 on it, but I'm not getting very far.

My BIOS (latest available from EPOX for a KT-333/VT8233 motherboard) has 
3 different ways of presenting the cylinders/heads/sectors information, 
which it claims add up to 200GB.

CHS: 65535/16/255
LBA: 16643/255/63
Large: 4095/240/255

When I boot with -v, there is a message prefixed 'ad0:' close to the 
drive identification which give values of 387621/16/63.
Somewhat differently, the set of geometries later sandwiched presented 
after a GEOM says (in full):

[0] f:80 type:165 s(CHS):0/1/1/ e(CHS):1023/254/63 s:631 l:390716802

When I fire up sysinstall and make to enter fdisk, it complains that 
387621/16/63 can't be right, and defaults to 'more likely' values of 
24321/255/63 without being specially confident that its replacement 
values are right either.

 From all I have read, it would seem that what I am supposed to do is 
feed in the values from the BIOS.  The 'CHS' and 'LBA' versions are 
accepted by sysinstall, but tally up to only 130-ish GB.  Sysinstall 
won't accept the 'Large' version at all.

But even if I specify a geometry that sysinstall seems happy with, 
accepting the 130GB limit, and follow through with deleting all existing 
partiotions, and allocating all space to a FreeBSD slice with the 'A' 
key, and subesquently labelling the slice again with the 'A(uto)' key, 
disklabel seems to allocate more space to labels than allowed by the 
geometry!  And thus (I think) when I try to newfs the large /usr lablel, 
I get failures like the following on the 'ALT+F2' tty:

/mnt/dev/ad0s1f: 154939.7MB (317316480 sectors) block size 16384 
fragment size 2048
Using 844 cylinder gruops of 183.77 MB, 11761 blks, 23552 inodes with 
softupdates.
super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at: (
[here are a lot of block addresses, finally getting to the following 
...] 304468928 [and then becoming interrupted with]
ad0: TIMEOUT_WRITE_DMA [while the drive grunts, and more stuff follows, 
which is largely the newfs reporting the failure].

So in short, I'm very confused about how to use my new disk to install 
FreeBSD 5.4!

Can anyone help?  I just want to get an OS up and running - I don't even 
care if I only use 130GB of the disk at this point in time.  I don't 
specially care that this new is the boot drive (I have a 20GB and 60GB 
drives too, but I'd have to copy stuff off each of them to the new one 
first).  (Am happy to post this somewhere more appropriate, if appropriate).

thanks,
David.