On Sat, May 01, 1999 at 10:46:32PM -0400, dbsaint@bellsouth.net wrote:
> 
> 
> Since you are the one that maintains such things :)
> 
> I have a laptop that is a Micron Millenia Transport.
> It has a 3 GB drive that is not properly probed by the install kernel resulting
> in < not to mention major data loss for me , but thats the whole fun of beta
> testing > anyway, Im pretty sure this is the model drive that originally came
> with the laptop. 
> the bios reports this:
> 
> Type: Auto 3242 Mb
> Cylinders:  6282
> Heads:       16
> Sectors / track  63
> Write precomp: none
> 
> Multi sector transfers  16 sectors
> LBA mode control Enabled
> 32 Bit I/O Enabled
> Transfer Mode: Fast PIO 4
> 
> NetBSd finds this disk to be:
>  1024 cylinders
>  8 heads
>  17 sect / track

Btw, I believe Manuel's away on holiday for a bit, so he may not be able to
get back to you at the moment.

Anyway.. could you perhaps tell me what the 'dmesg' output is on your system
for that drive? I.e. look for 'wd0: ' lines when the system boots, or
run 'dmesg' when it's up. Or cat /kern/msgbuf if kernfs is mounted.

The negative numbers given by sysinst are caused by the mismatch between
the BIOS size and the 'real' size. Normally, if there is such a difference,
the BIOS will think that it's smaller, and you'll have no problem, because
the limiting factor will be the partition you created for it. However, in
your case, the information that NetBSD gets via the BIOS is correct, but
the 'real' geometry is much smaller (and wrong), causing the weird
negative numbers.

So your main problem is that the real geometry for the drive is probed
wrongly.

- Frank