Re: HDD Geometry Issues


My HDD is an ST340810A 3.31. The BIOS gives its stats as:

Cylinder: 19158
Head: 16
Precomp: 0
Landing Zone: 19157
Sector: 255

I found the official doc at
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/ata/st340810a.html although
I'm not too sure how to interpret it.

When I go to allocate disk space during install, it says that a
geometry of 77545/16/63 is incorrect and uses instead 4865/255/63. Even
when I reset the geometry to 19158/16/255, it says that's wrong too.

If I use the entire disk with 'A', I see:

Offset Size(ST) End Name PType Desc Subtype
0 63 62 --- 12 unused 0
63 78156162 78156224 ad0s1 8 freebsd 165
78156225 9135 78165359 --- 12 unused 0

Somebody who really knows about this stuff needs to write some
verbiage for the handbook.

What I have read and what seems to work for me is that the geometry
on currently modern drives is "virtual" as far as the OS is concerned
and that you should go ahead and just slice and partition the disk
and build your file systems. If it works, don't worry about the
geometry messages.

////jerry

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