Bug 15546

I had a bad experience installing my new 40GB Maxtor hard drive, but
ultimately figured out a work-around.  I'm submitting this to try and
help others avoid the experience I had.

The first problem I had was with my Award BIOS getting stuck in POST.
I obtained a BIOS upgrade which didn't help.  But disabling the drive
in the BIOS setup did work since it's not my boot drive, and FreeBSD
does a good job of finding it.  The boot problem is mentioned at:
http://www.maxtor.com/satisfaction/32gbissues.html.

Once I booted FreeBSD with the new drive I made the fdisk and
FreeBSD labels and then newfs'd.  Newsf almost finished (did all
the counting up) but died near the end with a "Read-only file
system" error.  Fsck and mount attempts failed complaining about
lack of a superblock.

FreeBSD seems to have a 16 bit cylinder numbering limitation which
I believe is what was causing the mysterious problem.  The BIOS was
reporting more than 65536 cylinders, but FreeBSD's fdisk wasn't
allowing it.  And while fdisk made a warning about this and
computed LBA sizing for the disk, newfs couldn't complete with it.

Finally I somehow realized that FreeBSD needed to start using LBA
sizing for that drive and I found the kernel configuration options
for that, and now everything is great again.


So...  To help other people avoid this, and I do think other people
will be running into this soon, I think the fdisk should suggest
that LBA be enabled within the kernel.  It should do this when it
complains about CHS size.  Better yet, FreeBSD should deal with
more than 16 bits of cylinder numbering.

Fix: 

Enable LBA option for the drive in the FreeBSD kernel configuration.
How-To-Repeat: Install a Maxtor 40GB IDE drive without enabling LBA in FreeBSD's
driver, create a label with one filesystem for the whole drive
and attempt to newfs.  Newfs will almost finish and then die with
"Read-only file system".