On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 07:07:02PM -0400, felix zaslavskiy wrote:
> One particular problem i had couple of days ago.
> I was installing one a not so old computer with a new disk and the
> question about BIOS geometry confused me because it claimed the disk had
> less cylinders then what it actualy says on the disk. I know all about
> that the BIOS geometry is fake now but for newbie people or who had not
> read the installation guid in detail they would not know that.

That section does give far too much scope for shooting oneself in the foot.
I fixed the equivalent code in fdisk so that it almost always gets the
correct geometry, won't allow the user to input illegal geometries and
gives resonably likely defaults (the true geometry is never right!)
 
> I said geometry was incorrect and picked the real geometry.  Ofcouse
> then nothing worked.  The sysinstall continued and let me select the
> partition sizes but the actualy write to disk failed.

I would havethought the writes suceeded, although you could easily
be left with an unbootable disk.

The more recent netbsd boot code is less likely to be unbootable if the
bios geometry is wrong.  It will use LBA reads in that case...

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk