The startup messages and the installation menu prompts have me
thoroughly confused.  In the BIOS CMOS setup I am in the habit of
setting C/H/S manually, so the type is "User" and the mode is "NORMAL."
The message during the boot process reflects this, and for example
says: "1160MB 2358cyl 16heads 63sec 2376864sectors," which is correct
for the example drive IBM-DPRA-21215.  However, the installation prompt
says "This disk matches the following BIOS disk"
	BIOS#	cylinders	heads	sectors
	  0	    1023	 16	   63
which appears to me to be a LBA translation, of sorts.  I went ahead and
chose to "b: set the geometry by hand \ cylinders [2358] \ heads [16] \
sectors [63]."  So far, so good; things seem to be working without problem.

BUT I am worried, having already lost a faulty drive to NetBSD (see below
if interested).  Why I'm really worried is that I started a second
installation on a much faster (and costlier) machine using a brand-new
Quantum Fireball SE21A014, C/H/S:4092/16/63.  Despite being a disk twice the
size of the IBM one above, the installation prompt was _exactly the same_:
        BIOS#   cylinders       heads   sectors
          0         1023         16        63
What am I to make of this?!  The disk is worth nearly US$100 and I can't
afford to take chances.

Before installing NetBSD should I have the BIOS automatically detect (not
always an option), set it according to LBA, or set it as I have in the
past by entering the C/H/S values, i.e., NORMAL mode?

henry nelson

PS For interested parties, here's the dope on the faulty drive, This
WDC AC21700H should be C/H/S 3308/16/63, but it has an irrecoverable
error at cylinder 3174, so while on MS-DOS the whole disk is seen, on
FreeBSD only the first 3174 cylinders are found.  With FreeBSD it was
possible to use MS-DOS to partition out the bad portion (specifically,
one "safe" 1.5GB for FreeBSD, one buffer of 30MB good disk with MS-DOS,
and the rest ca. 100MB no-mans-land with MS-DOS).  For the life of me
I couldn't get NetBSD to respect the MS-DOS partitioning nor believe the
C/H/S parameters.  Twelve bucks down the tubes (but NetBSD is still my
friend :)