http://www.NetBSD.org/cgi-bin/query-pr-single.pl?number=5052

The PR is still true. I've spent 2+ days battling to try and make sysinst
do an install on a clean disk. Nothing works.

FreeBSD still stuffs up mildly the C/H/S but at least it manages to install
ok. for NetBSD sysinst dies in newfs writing beyond MBR or what it thinks is
the end of the partition structure. 

I really wanted to see how NetBSD was these days. I can't say that this
is encouraging...

(it did this on a 545Mb seagate as well. I think we can take it that the
 fake bios geometry stuff is hosed for a fairly large class of disks)

ASUS P55T2P4 blown to latest rev BIOS firmware. Tried LBA/Normal/Large/Auto
in bios. no change. This was a phenominally popular mainboard 1-2 years ago
and I'm amazed more people don't have problems. Is it drive-specific somehow?
(and an IBM and a Seagate drive doesn't sound that un-mainstream...)

I also tried partition magic to refix the MBR, installing tiny 16Mb
DOS partition at front, whole disk dedicated, install after FreeBSD,
all make no difference.  bummer. Can't do anything more here.

Any suggestions anyone?

        -George