Re: 200GB IDE disk on old system

Wilhelm B. Kloke wrote:
I want to put a 200GB into my old AMD K6 system. The BIOS does not support
more than 32GB. Is there a way to persuade FreeBSD to accept the
real disk size?

Yes, boot FreeBSD and find out what it thinks.

No, seriously, what the BIOS thinks about the drive is only relevant if
a) you plan to boot from the disk
b) FreeBSD also thinks wrongly about the size of the disk

I am using several old machines ith bios limitations on disk size and large disks.
Normally, it is not a problem.
- if you want to boot from the disk, the boot loader and root partition must be within the size limit that the bios can accept
- a message about "geometry mismatch" can be ignored if you only use the disk for FreeBSD (ie. no dual boot)

Note: there are a few systems where the hardware (disk controller) doesn't support large disks (48 bit LBA). On such systems, nothing you do in FreeBSD (or another operating system) will help.

Normally, I just install the large disk, reboot the system (into FreeBSD) and install / use the large disk.
--
Torfinn Ingolfsen,
Norway
.

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