Re: Disk geom and freeBSD 6.2 on lenovoe T60 thinkpad laptop

Charlie Sorsby wrote:

Hello,

I enquired about this before but then (unrelated) things came up
and I had to put the installation on the back burner for a while.
I'm only now returning to it.

Here are the notes that I made when I booted from the distribution
CD (from freeBSD mall as I recall); the notes are between the lines
of "#" characters:

######################

Sunday, 27 Jan, 2008 -- 12:35:32 MST

Well, this is my second attempt to install freeBSD 6.2 on the
Lenovo T60 ThinkPad laptop.

Don't have one of these myself.

Before the earlier attempt, I had used PartitionMagic to shrink the
Windows XP slice and make room for freeBSD.

Ughhh! Partition Magic is truly evil! It does non standard things. I quit
using it years ago.

When I, later, tried to install from the distribution CD, the
installer complained about the disk geometry. I didn't copy the
complaint down at that time so I'm going to try again and *try* to
enter all error messages into this file.

Booting from the CD:

Country/region/group menu appears; selecting United States.

At the sysinstall Main Menu which appeared next, I am selecting the
Standard installation.

Next is the fdisk message. Accepting the "OK" (the only choice)
takes me to another Message:

This is not an fdisk message, this is an error from sysinstall:

Message
WARNING: A geometry of 232581/16/63 for ad4 is
^^^^^^^^^^^^
This looks like CHS geometry.

incorrect. Using a more likely geometry. If this
geometry is incorrect or you are unsure as to whether
or not it's correct, please consult the Hardware Guide
in the Documentation sub menu or use the (G)eometery
command to change it now.

Remember: you need to enter whatever your BIOS thinks
the geometry is! For IDE, it's what you were told
in the BIOS setup. For SCSI, it's the translation
mode your controller is using. Do NOT use a ``physical
geometry''.

If this is the message that pops up in sysinstall immediately prior to
launching fdisk, it is generally safe to ignore it. I just did an install
of 7.0 RC1 and when I set the BIOS manually to LBA (it was coming up CHS on
its own) I still saw this message, even though the LBA translation matched
exactly what fdisk subsequently reported. There is something wrong with
sysinstall.

There is a difference between what sysinstall reports and what fdisk
reports. Even when you *know* the BIOS is providing an LBA translation that
_exactly_ matches what fdisk reports you will still see this error from
sysinstall.

Last time, I tried going to the BIOS setup screens but there was
*nothing* about the disk geometry. I called Lenovo and their tech
support guy didn't know what I was talking about. He ended up
telling me that that's information that the hardware engineers know
about and not available -- or something to that effect.

Again - I don't know this laptop. But generally there is a BIOS page that
lists drives and you can cursor up and down to select different drives by
pressing return on a highlighted entry. Usually, the next screen will
show "Auto" something or other and if you highlight "Auto" and press return
you can get to a screen where you can usually choose from one of three
translations manually. What fdisk is expecting to see is "LBA".

Accepting the "OK" (again the only choice), I am taken to the FDISK
Partition Editor where it says:

Disk name: ad4 FDISK Partition Editor
DISK Geometery: 14593 cyls/255 heads/63 sectors = 234436545 sectors
(114470MB) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This does look like an LBA geometry, which is what you want.
Notice that it is different from what sysinstall thinks.

Offset Size(ST) End Name PType Desc Subtype Flags
0 63 62 - 12 unused 0
63 92156337 92156399 ad4s1 4 NTFS/HPFS/QNX 7
92156400 9646560 101802959 ad4s2 4 Compaq Diagnostic 18
101802960 132638688 234441647 - 12 unused 0

[Followed by the command summary.]

*I* certainly don't know whether what sysinstall thinks the
geometry should be is correct or not.

Sysinstall most likely has it wrong. My bet here is fdisk has it right.


Because I have no bloody idea what the disk geometry is, I'm afraid
to continue. I don't recall ever having had such comments/complaints
in past when installing earlier versions of freeBSD on desktop systems
such as the one I'm typing this on which is running freeBSD 4.11.


If you wish to continue you don't have any choice. The drive has already
been setup by Partition Magic and the other operating system. Since it
looks like fdisk is seeing LBA you can probably ignore sysinstall.

BUT!!!!! You should prepare a recovery plan in advance. BACK UP anything you
do not want to lose! While you may not have any choice if you do wish to
proceed, you just may wind up with a system that needs to be totally
reinstalled from the ground up. Prepare for the possibility, and if you are
not prepared don't take the chance if anything on that drive is important
to you.

If the partition table on the drive is standard then fdisk is only going to
add a few bytes to it. If Partition Magic has garbaged it then when fdisk
writes into it it will be hosed at that point. I have seen Partition Magic
do this before. It's why I won't use it.



So, should I just continue the process using the geometry that
sysinstall "guesses" or will that cause problems? If the latter,
how can I learn the proper geometry to use? I couldn't find
anything in the BIOS configuration to tell me and, as I comment in
the notes above, lenovo's tech support were useless.

Most "tech support" for retail markets is advertising. "Useless" is a sheer
understatement.

Any help will be sincerely appreciated.

Don't know what help any of this may have been. My bet is you can ignore the
sysinstall error like so many of us do, use whatever geometry comes up in
fdisk, and the install should be OK. The real monkey wrench here is
Partition Magic. Like I said before: If you're not ready to lose data then
don't get caught with your pants down. If you are prepared to recover lost
data then give it a go. Caveat Emptor: YMMV!

-Jason


.

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