137GB barrier - multi O/S install problem


I recently managed to scrape enough pennies to rebuild my lightning-bit
workstation. Motherboard ECS KM400-M2 (rev 3.0) HD wd1600JB, 160gb.

I created a small NTFS partition (8gb) for Win2k, and a few more
30gb FAT32 partitions to share with FreeBSD and Linux, which also
need to go on this box. Then I noticed a problem. Windows was
only showing 137GB for the drive size in system informatien.
I looked in the BIOS and found the following geometry:
C/H/S is 65535/16/255, which adds up to about 137gb.

I then attempted to install FreeBSD which immediately complained
of bad geometry and enforces a C/H/S of 19457/255/63.
(which is much closer to the 160gb I paid for) FreeBSD apparently
ignores (?) BIOS and queries the HD directly.

While I know FreeBSD will happily run drives much larger than the
BIOS will support, that is on systems dedicated to FreeBSD - mine
needs to play nice with Windows.

Questions: Deos anyone know if I can happily accept the FreeBSD
geometry, or will FreeBSD write things in the partition table that
will screw up Windows? I thought somewhere is some MBR voodoo
that needs some consistency in the cyl/head/sector geometry.

Further, because Windows apparently believes the limited BIOS
geometry, and since FreeBSD is apparently more correct, what happens
to the FAT32 partitions that I want to write to from either O/S?

Should I wipe the whole disk and use FreeBSDs FDisk utility to
create the NTFS and FAT32 partitions?

I've taken a look at the addressing modes available in BIOS:

LBA: Cyl - 16643, Heads - 255, Sectors - 63   = 136893335040 bytes
Large: Cyl - 4095, Heads - 240, Sectors - 255 = 128314368000 bytes
CHS:  Cyl - 65535, Heads - 16, Sectors - 255 = 136899993600

Auto, which is what I had when I installed Win2K apparetly uses
CHS, at least the geometry reported by Auto matches - but none
of the options gets past 137gb


Many thanks,

Conrad
.

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