g/fbsd help with partitions CHS LBA conversion stuff.

otisranson · Apprentice Joined: 17 May 2007 Posts: 188

I'm having trouble with the g/fbsd install because says my drive geometry is not correct so it defaults to another setting.

I have a seagate momentus 7200.1 200gb hd in my laptop. Model ST9200420ASG

http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/notebook/momentus/7200.2/100451238d.pdf

or
http://209.85.207.104/search?q=cache:G3sglUUgioEJ:www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/notebook/momentus/7200.2/100451238d.pdf+ST9200420ASG+geometry&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us

is the manual. Now, the manual says 16383/16/63 cylinders/heads/sectors but that is just not enough. I read some more in there and gives me LBA value of 390,721,968. I need to convert it to C/H/S

Found this site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHS_conversion It explains how to convert from LBA, but I don't have all of the information. Could anyone offer any advice? I'm doing a dual boot with windows on the first 3/4 of the drive.

Also is it possible to install grub as the boot manager?

Thanks I'm looking for the CHS values. My closest guess is 387621/16/63. This is a brand new laptop, don't want to screw the hard drive up physically, is that even possible by inputting the wrong values?. I don't care if it takes me a few times to reformat.

Thanks guys!

cyrillic · Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2008 12:49 am Post subject:

As far as I know, all modern BIOSes expect the partition table to be setup for 255 heads (not 16). If the BIOS, the partition table, and the bootloader don't all agree on the harddrive geometry, then you may have difficulty booting.

Can you post your current partition info ?
Mine looks like this :

otisranson · Apprentice Joined: 17 May 2007 Posts: 188

For my disk partitioning stuff, it's really a loss of hard drive space, but honestly, not really worried about it. I booted up with a GParted LiveCD and saw that there was an extra partition on there that Windows XP had created. 30GB file system and 6GB swap space is absolutely plenty for what I'm going to be using g/fbsd for.

Got grub installed and dual booted with Windows XP / G/FBSD followed the G/FBSD install guide for the most part and looked at the handbook for the grub config stuff. Thanks for the reply and help though!

mark_alec · Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 3:46 am Post subject:

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Gentoo on Alternative Architectures.
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