Hey folks, So what's the word on AHCI and bios drive geometry? I'm having a real pain of a time trying to get some 750gb sata drives running on my FreeBSD7 box in AHCI mode. It doesn't seem to matter what disk geometry I suggest to sysinstall, something complains of an invalid disk upon booting it. Actually, in AHCI mode the bios screen doesn't report any information on drive geometry, so all bets appear to be off in giving sysinstall the correct figures. What should I do? Thanks, Joe
On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 08:12:26AM +0100, Josef Karthauser wrote:> So what's the word on AHCI and bios drive geometry? I'm having a real > pain of a time trying to get some 750gb sata drives running on my > FreeBSD7 box in AHCI mode. It doesn't seem to matter what disk geometry > I suggest to sysinstall, something complains of an invalid disk upon > booting it. > > Actually, in AHCI mode the bios screen doesn't report any information on > drive geometry, so all bets appear to be off in giving sysinstall the > correct figures.I have no problems using AHCI on our Supermicro SuperServer 5015M-T+ systems, which are Intel ICH7-based, and with disks ranging up to 500GB. There are no disk geometry issues I encounter. Here's an example of one of the heavily-loaded boxes. The boot/OS disk is ad4. atapci1: <Intel AHCI controller> port 0x30e8-0x30ef,0x30dc-0x30df,0x30e0-0x30e7,0x30d8-0x30db,0x30b0-0x30bf mem 0xe8600400-0xe86007ff irq 19 at device 31.2 on pci0 atapci1: [ITHREAD] atapci1: AHCI Version 01.10 controller with 4 ports detected ata2: <ATA channel 0> on atapci1 ata2: [ITHREAD] ata3: <ATA channel 1> on atapci1 ata3: [ITHREAD] ata4: <ATA channel 2> on atapci1 ata4: [ITHREAD] ata5: <ATA channel 3> on atapci1 ata5: [ITHREAD] ad4: 190782MB <WDC WD2000JD-00HBB0 08.02D08> at ata2-master SATA150 ad6: 476940MB <WDC WD5000AAKS-00YGA0 12.01C02> at ata3-master SATA300 ad8: 476940MB <WDC WD5000AAKS-00TMA0 12.01C01> at ata4-master SATA300 ad10: 476940MB <WDC WD5000AAKS-00TMA0 12.01C01> at ata5-master SATA300 -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
On Wed, 16 Apr 2008, Josef Karthauser wrote:> So what's the word on AHCI and bios drive geometry? I'm having a real > pain of a time trying to get some 750gb sata drives running on my > FreeBSD7 box in AHCI mode. It doesn't seem to matter what disk > geometry I suggest to sysinstall, something complains of an invalid > disk upon booting it. > > > > Actually, in AHCI mode the bios screen doesn't report any information > on drive geometry, so all bets appear to be off in giving sysinstall > the correct figures.I would think anything this modern would totally ignore CHS and hence any warnings about bogus geometry are in themselves totally bogus. ie just ignore sysinstalls bleatings. -- Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Andrew Tanenbaum GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 187 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20080416/d02036ac/attachment-0001.pgp