FreeBSD 8.x and 4K sector drives

FreeBSD 8.x (and older) use sysinstall as the install mechanism and fdisk for disk slicing/partitioning. Unfortunately, these utilities perform calculations based on a 512B sector size. This causes problems with drives of a sector size greater than this. 4K sector size drives are the most popular at this point.

I cannot explain the problem and solutions any better than Ivan Voras (FreeBSD source contributor since 2008), so I link to his blog here.

There are good tidbits of information in the comments such as sysinstall not understanding gpart, etc. It would be a good idea to read through the comments as well.