IDE cylinder translation woes

[bsm@xxxxxxx (Barry Morris)]

I am working on a DELL Optiplex 466/LE with 516 MB IDE drive and 16MB
memory.  I have a 300MB DOS partition at the beginning of the drive, and
when trying to install FreeBSD 2.0-941222-SNAP on the rest of the drive I
get a newfs timeout on /usr.

The hardware geometry of the drive (as reported by the FreeBSD boot process)
is 1120 cyls, 59 sectors and 16 heads.

The DOS fdisk and pfdisk programs report a geometry of 523,63,32 (which I
assume to be the BIOS translation).

When I boot FreeBSD it gives me a wd warning that it can't handle 32 heads
and that it is setting the controller to 16 heads.  When I get into the
FreeBSD fdisk program the reported geometry is 1048,63,16 (which must be yet
another translation it performed when resetting the controller to 16 heads ?).

Thereafter no matter what I do in the way of disklabelling I always get a wd
timeout during newfs on /usr (the last partition on the drive).  The error
message contains "cn 522 sn 63 tn 31" or something very similar, and it
suggests to me that it is trying to access blocks that just aren't there.  

I'm just about to give up on this - but any explanation of what's happening
would be well received.

Many thanks

        - barry 

- - - - 

Barry Morris
IONA Technologies
8-34 Percy Place 
Ireland. 

email: bsm@xxxxxxx 
ftp:   ftp.iona.ie 
WWW:   http://www.iona.ie/
tel:   +353-1-6686522
fax:   +353-1-6686573
In the USA call: 1-800 orbix4u, 1-800 6724948