On Fri, 28 Apr 2006, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:

> On Fri, 28 Apr 2006 12:27:23 -0400 (EDT), "Brian A. Seklecki"
> <lavalamp@spiritual-machines.org> wrote:
>
>>> geometry.  Note the "geomspec" operand to vnconfig; if you get that right,
>>
>> "Ahhhh" you're right.  I forgot about the whole PC BIOS LBA/CHS/Large mode
>> access.  I can toggle on or off LBA access mode on some of my dev boxes;
>> however some of them like to probe it in CHS mode.
>>
>> What mode do you suppose a CF ATA adapter should be in?  This is 1GIG, so
>> translation is almost a must.
>
> ENOCLUE.

Try the default 'large' drive settings. A CF card should be LBA always. 
Try 1953125 sectors with CHS = 122/255/63 (I just calculated this. 
there is no warranty). My autonomous install script for 1.6.1 uses data 
obtained with fdisk -S at runtime to get the real disk geometry (as seen 
by the system booted from cd), and then prepares slices using fdisk 
-fi followed by fdisk -s C/H/S using that data, then a label is 
generated again using the same data and written out with disklabel -R

Peter