FreeBSD® Unleashed

Understanding Hard Disk Geometry

You'll see a lot of references to “hard disk geometry” in the online tutorials that explain how to prepare your disks, and you'll run into it every time you run fdisk (or the friendlier interfaces to fdisk that we'll be using). Fortunately, this is something that owners of newer hardware (that is, hardware manufactured after hard disks larger than 8GB were common) or owners of SCSI disks can skip or ignore. It's only there for informational purposes—its functional importance is now no longer the administrator's responsibility—it's the hardware's.

One of FreeBSD's strengths, though, is that it will run—efficiently—even on older hardware that is considered obsolete for desktop use or to run Windows. Your 166MHz ...