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FreeBSD 5.3-BETA4 Available
BrunoC writes "Once again, the FreeBSD Project presents yet another beta release of FreeBSD 5.3. FreeBSD 5.3 BETA 4 features major bugfixes for ATA, 4BSD is now the default scheduler and overall stability has greatly improved. BETA 5 should hit the streets next week and should be the last BETA and a Release Candidate is scheduled too. 5.3 should be around by October 3rd. ISO images are available for those who want to help the testing process." (Use a mirror.)
From your entire bug report, it seems pretty obvious that something is rather wrong with the ata controller and/or bios on your hardware.
I happen to have had 3 of the same Maxtor drives as you have, and the last surviving one is currently primary master in my router. (hint, replace them, I have had 2 of them give up within short time of eachother, and the 3rd one seems to be getting close to giving up)
All 3 have always worked with FreeBSD, Linux and Windows, without any confusion with regards to its CHS settings.
I did however follow the rather strong suggestion that my BIOS gives me to run the bios auto detect and select 'normal' mode for a drive on which I am going to use a unix like system. This results in a user configured drive (for as far as the standard cmos settings go)
Oh, and I also followed the recomendations to have the disk as primary, and a cd drive as slave instead of having it as primary like you have.
That it is not recognized that way during sysinstall seems rather suspicious to me.
Maybe FreeBSD needs some patches for detectign this broken hardware configuration, just as it did get a patch for dealing with the rather broken bios of the asus p2b-ds that I happen to use (apic is broken, resulting in an interupt storm when doing things according to the official standard)
If you think this problem affects more then your very specific case, I suggest talking about it on the mailinglists for -current, and try to be helpfull in getting a workaround, ie, that means accepting that it is in fact a problem of your hardware.
All that said, your comment regarding fdisk seems to be correct, and it should accept the alternative geometry if those fit within the physical number of sectors that the drive has.