At 15:24 10.10.99 +0000, jiho wrote:
>I want to change the BIOS geometry because it got fouled up somehow.  The
>installation got it right the first time, at 255 heads.  Now it's 15 heads.
>Yes, I ran the DOS fdisk, but I've run that without incident on this drive,
>since installing NetBSD and its boot menu.  (That's the BIOS geometry, what
>would DOS do to it?)
>
>I tried to install Linux.  The Linux fdisk complained about a "corrupt"
>partition table.  The only choices were to wipe the whole thing out, or 
>abort.
>  Obviously I aborted.  Lovely.

ISTR that I had remotely similar problems during a 1.4.1 sysinst install on 
an AHA2940UW. Sysinst offered the "BIOS geometry" and the "geometry" that 
the drive announced during boot. The former didn't get me anywhere, while 
the latter worked; but I found that sysinst had messed up the MBR partition 
table by inserting the cylinder numbers from the "drive geometry". Luckily 
I had scribbled down the original values (I had set up a small DOS 
partition and set up the MBR partition tabl ewith pfdisk), so I was able to 
manually fix the cylinder values.

>I never had these problems before because I used os-bs for a boot menu, on a
>smaller drive.  But of course, os-bs doesn't know the extended BIOS call
>required to boot from beyond 1024 cylinders.

The "boot menue" didn't work for me. Installing os-bs helped here. All in 
all, sysinst left the usual mixed emotions. Some things are really nice to 
have, but the time you have gained by its features you lose doubly while 
working around the bugs.

         hauke


--
Hauke Fath                              Saphir Software GmbH
                                         D-69115 Heidelberg
hf@SaphirSC.DE                          Ruf +49-6221-13866-35, Fax -21