OK, I was really thinking the 1Gig limit (just for these Quantum Fireball 
1.(25)G drives), not the cylinder thing.

I bumped the memory allotted up to 15 M and it made not one whit of 
difference.

I first made a 500 M mac and 700 M BSD partition.  Did not work.  Then I 
made a 500, 500, 200--the middle 500 was a BSD partition, forget where 
swap was.  Did not work.  Then made a 50 M swap, a 500 root+user, a 500 M 
Mac and a 200 M mac.  Damn if that didn't fix it.  You're going to have 
to convince me there isn't a 1G problem of some sort with this disk.  I 
reformatted the thing a zillion times and let Silverlining thrash on it 
(reading and writing sectors) for 8 continous hours.  Near as I can tell, 
only moving the BSD partition to the front of the disk (and away from 1G 
mark) worked.  YMMV. (and no, I didn't mess with the cabling at any time)

                                    Kevin 

On Tue, 20 Jan 1998, Robert Nestor wrote:

> Kevin Havener <havenerk@Walden.MO.NET> wrote:
> 
> >None of us could say what's causing the error.   I suspect that it won't 
> >install if the partition crosses the 1023 cylinder limit.  Others report 
> >a mismatch between the drive geometry (C/H/S) reported by mkfs and ffs.  
> >One who got it to work got a minimal system going on a small root at the 
> >front of the disk.  Then used *BSD to install the rest--thus he was able 
> >to report the geometry mismatch.  The rest of us, like you, couldn't get 
> >that far.
> 
> I doubt there is a problem with the 1023 cylinder limit.  We did have a 
> problem with Mkfs and the Installer not handling drives larger than 1Gig, 
> but that was a long time ago and both have been fixed (long before 
> OpenBSD appeared).  In fact the fixes were tested on my 1.6Gig drive a 
> year or so ago.  Since then I've moved up to a 9Gig drive without a 
> problem.  Also the drive geometry on SCSI disks shouldn't be an issue.  
> Worst case you'd probably see some performance degradation, but shouldn't 
> see any file corruption.  However, if it realy worries you it's possible 
> to tell Mkfs what parameters to use.   Most likely the problem is 
> insufficent RAM for the Installer, or possibly a SCSI termination issue 
> if it's an external drive.  Active Termination on the SCSI bus can't hurt 
> and in many cases it sure helps.
> 
> -bob
> 
> 
> 
>