On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, Brian A. Seklecki wrote:

> RB> I think I've got it working now, but I want to make sure I'm not totally
> RB> out to lunch here.  Here's what I did:
> RB> - changed the geometry to increase the number of cylinders and decrease
> RB>   the number of heads:  35556 cyl, 64 hd, 63 sec
> RB>   The boot code is accessed by block number, so it shouldn't matter
> RB>   that this doesn't match the BIOS geometry, right?
> RB> - use 8192/1024 bs/fs on all reasonably sized (<=6GB) slices
>
> ...there were a number of threads a few months ago about large drives (160
> gig was in question, you know the maxtor's).  Let me see if I can dig them
> up.

Thanks.  I went through my archives, and I did read that thread.  I don't
think it was directly applicable to me though (although I must admit I
didn't read EVERY message - it was a long thread).  The main discussion
topic was about some extended interface for addressing the extra blocks
beyond 100 GIG or so.  Thats not the problem for me.  I think a lot of
those big IDE drives report a geometry that is more favourable to NetBSD -
64 heads instead of the 255 heads I got.  The only message I found that
was relevant to my problem (posted by Kevin Lahey on June 18th) had no
response.

Interrestingly enough, when I changed the MBR and disklabel geometry of my
drive, the RAID BIOS somehow noticed and switched to reporting the
geometry I chose!  Things appear to be working fine, although I haven't
done any performance testing.

Thanks,
	Rick