In addition, on most disks the list is also written onto the disk. Please use the manufacturer's list. It is much easier to remap a defect now than after FreeBSD is installed. Stay away from low-level formatters that mark all sectors of a track as bad as soon as they find one bad sector. Translations Translations, although not exclusively a ESDI-only problem, might give you real trouble.
Translations come in multiple flavors.
Only 10 bits are available to encode the cylinder number. To work around this problem, the manufacturers of ESDI PC controllers added a BIOS prom extension on their boards. The result is that the number of cylinders is reduced to something below 1024 and is therefore usable by the system without problems. It is noteworthy to know that FreeBSD does not use the BIOS after its kernel has started. More on this later.