I just installed PC-BSD yesterday and it seemed great at first but then it would just freeze up after a couple of minutes using it. I just figured something was wrong with the download since this isn't normally a characteristic of UNIX OS's. Well I decided I go ahead and put Fedora 3 on there. When I try to put Fedora on the machine I get and error message after selecting my country that says:

Bug
Assertion (heads < 256) at disk_dos.c:486 in function probe_partition_for_geom() failed.

If I click ignore is gives me this:

Bug
Assertion ((C* heads + H)* sectors + S ==A) at disk_dos.c:495 in function probe_partition_for_geom() failed

I checked the disk before installing and it said it was fine to install. The computer hasnt had anthing on it for about two weeks but I didnt have any problems like this before. I have installed Fedore 3 before without problems so I know it works fine on this computer. I am just guessing that maybe something happened to some piece of hardware since I am having problems with both BSD and Fedora, but I really have no clue.


Thanks,
LivinLarge

Looks like a bad partition table or failing hd. Try deleting the partitions and recreating them. Or you could boot a livecd like knoppix and fsck the partitions.
Is the hd geometry reported correctly in the BIOS?

Where do I find the geometry in the BIOS? I don't have the live cd, I guess I could download it, but I did put in a freeBSD disk since I figured I could just delete the partitions using fdisk. Before I went into fdisk it said...A geometry of 77545/16/63 is incorrect. Is that just for freeBSD or is that in general. If it is incorrect in general, how do I change it, I looked in BIOS but couldn't find anything about the geometry.

Thanks,
LivinLarge

You could just open the computer and have a look at the sticker on the drive. The BIOS is probably set on auto for the drive but should have an option to manually set heads/sectors/cylinders. If it fails and still gives an error, you can set it on bootup with lilo or grub. I have one drive that gives wrong info but works fine when I put hdb=2434,255,63 in the append line in lilo.conf. The values are what I get from "fdisk -l". When booting a livecd you can specify this at the boot prompt, just change the values according to what fdisk says.
This whole thing could be just a compatibility issue between ATA and BIOS geometries. A quick google gives this: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/f...ne/048133.html