On Tue Nov 30 1999 at 16:01:02 +0100, Manuel Bouyer wrote:

> > orange# fdisk sd0
> > NetBSD disklabel disk geometry:
> > cylinders: 8387 heads: 5 sectors/track: 212 (1060 sectors/cylinder)
> > 
> > BIOS disk geometry:
> > cylinders: 1024 heads: 64 sectors/track: 32 (2048 sectors/cylinder)
> > 
> > Partition table:
> > 0: <UNUSED>
> > 1: <UNUSED>
> > 2: <UNUSED>
> > 3: sysid 169 (NetBSD)
> >     start 212, size 8890008 (4340 MB), flag 0x80
> >         beg: cylinder    0, head   1, sector  1
> >         end: cylinder 1023, head 255, sector 63
> > 
> > I tried various BIOS disk geometries. What can it be?
> 
> Actually your BIOS geometry and partition infos don't match.
> (partition ends at head 255/sect63 but you only have 64 head and 32 sects ???).
> You should at last adjust this (or let fdisk do it: just start fdisk -u sd0,
> say you want to change partition 3 and press enter to accept default values).
> 
> But the start is not aligned on a cylinder boundary, this may cause problems.
> You may want to 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd0d bs=64k count=10' (just 
> to be sure) and reinstall.
> The NetBSD installation tool should find a BIOS geometry by itself and ask if
> it's correct. It is in most cases.

I fought with this quite a lot. Or at least I think it is this that I
fought with. But anyways, I couldn't make the SCSI adapter find NetBSD
no matter what I did when I did it with NetBSD fdisk. Finally I made a
dos-bootable floppy and used pfdisk.exe. That made the difference.

pfdisk does put partitions ending on cylinder boundaries, but that is
not the key, at least that's what others have said.

I think this is the same problem as the one described in port-i386/8309

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