Subject: Adaptec disk geometry!!!
To: None <tech-install@NetBSD.ORG, dom@inta.net, port-i386@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Robert.V.Baron <rvb@gluck.coda.cs.cmu.edu>
List: tech-install
Date: 01/27/1998 10:11:00
> Here's the pfdisk output if that helps any:
>
> pfdisk> # Partition table on device: 0
> geometry 1021 64 32 (cyls heads sectors)
>From the beginning of time, Adaptec controllers have "normalized"
the disk geometry to have 64heads and 32sectors/track. Telling
people to use the disk geometry reported at boot is just plain wrong.
Actually, the pfdisk program is pretty reasonable and reliable at
reporting what bios thinks the geometry is.
Now "recently" people discovered that 64X32 sectors (== 1Meg) times
1024 cyl only gave 1Gig and hence there was a problem dealing with
large disks. So this is when Adaptec went to the >1 Gig option.
Here the controller uses 255 heads and 63 sectors/track. (This is
the largest values that can fit in the bit fields used for heads
and sectors.) BUT if you tell netbsd you have a cylinder of 255
heads and 63 sectors, newfs pukes. (You need blocks > 8K and larger
frags to support this.) What I do in this case, since this is all
make believe anyway, is say I have cylinders with 51 heads (255/5)
and 63 sectors/track. I then multiply the number of cyls and cyl
offsets by 5. It all works well.