I recently got fed up with the 400M IDE drive that came with my
machine and got a 2 gig SCSI drive.  As a result, I am catapulted into
the wonderful world of geometry translation.

Some info:

NetBSD version: 1.0
Adapter: Buslogic BT445C
Drive: HP C2940SE
Drive parameters as reported by bt driver:
  2860 cylinders, 18 heads, 87 sectors, 512 bytes/sector
Drive parameters as reported by MSDOS FDISK:
  1024 cylinders, 64 heads, 32 sectors
Desired partitioning: ~125M for DOS, rest is for NetBSD

Questions:

* Where did the bt driver get those numbers from?  The only number
that matches the manual that came with the drive is the number of
heads.

* Why does MSDOS use those ridiculous numbers?  Would I be better off
if I turned on the 'DOS drivers > 1GB' in the BT445C's setup?

* Why does NetBSD 1.0's fdisk think that the HP drive has 23 sectors
instead of 87?  Should I worry about it?

* Should I just say 'to h*ll with it' and give NetBSD the whole disk?

* Once beyond root and swap, is there any reason not to make the rest
of the drive just one giant partition?  (I'm not planning to keep a
local news spool.)

I'm also interested in any gotchas people have noticed with this
particular adapter or drive.
-- 
Mike Long <mike.long@analog.com>       PGP 2.6.2 public key signature:
VLSI Design Engineer                  CCBF225E7D3F7ECB2C8F7ABB15D9BE7B
Analog Devices, CPD Division
Norwood, MA 02062 USA                assert(*this!=opinionof(Analog));