The motherboard is an ASUS M2A-VM with both SATA and PATA. I've been trying to install to the WD400 (~40 GB) PATA drive (master, CD-ROM is the slave). It seems to work fine during the install.
Sean Cody wrote:
At the beginning of the install, it complained about the drive geometry (how 90s). The FreeBSD installer indicates that the geometry is set to 77545/16/63, that this is wrong, and it's using something better, which turns out to be 4865/255/63. When I go into the BIOS, it reports the geometry to be 19158/16/255. FreeBSD doesn't let me set the geometry to either of the two other ones!
This is the real clue. How big is the disk?
I've seen this happen before but mostly on VERY large disk arrays (1TB+). If sysinstall is complaining about the disk geometry you won't be able to boot from that drive. Sysinstall is really old and busted but this is a portent to other issues.
The other reason for this complaint is if the disk controller on your motherboard isn't supported all that well. Is this SATA/PATA? What is the Motherboard model as well as the drive model numbers?