Date: Fri, 29 Dec 1995 02:15:38 +1030 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: grog@lemis.de Cc: cosmos@misery.bssc.org, hackers@freebsd.org, jack@cdrom.com Subject: Re: HELP!!! THIS IS AN EMERGENCY (fwd) Message-ID: <199512281545.CAA03130@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <199512281149.MAA20604@allegro.lemis.de> from "Greg Lehey" at Dec 28, 95 12:49:38 pm
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Greg Lehey stands accused of saying:
>I don't find this amusing. OK, he may be a jerk, but on the other hand, maybe
>he isn't.
I'd have to say that anyone that uses the word 'fuck' when they're
looking for help isn't worth the effort. That's a bit of a personal
standard I guess, but I find it a useful starting point.
>He's certainly frustrated, and it would be nice to understand why,
>and if there's anything that we can do to ensure that it doesn't happen more
>often than absolutely necessary. What was the problem?
Basically, he leapt in way over his head and then ran around accusing
everyone and everything in sight of being responsible for him 'losing
everything'.
The "best" solution to the basic problem (no Jordan, no wolves this time 8)
would be better detection/interoperation with BIOS extenders. This is
kinda problematic though, as none of the deep-down disk hackers consider IDE
worthy of their spit, and the technical aspects of the problem are
pretty hairy.
>From your perspective, as a keen documenter of the installation process,
the tips that you can glean from this are :
- MAKE A BACKUP
- Installing to a disk in a system that is using a BIOS extender such as
OnTrack Corporation's Disk Manager is quite risky due to the translation
that these programs perform.
FreeBSD knows about Disk Manager, and should work OK with it, but other
similar programs are not supported, and installing to a disk using
such a program will almost certainly render the disk unusable.
The 'right' way to install to an IDE disk bigger than 500M that is shared
with DOS, when your system does _not_ have a BIOS that does LBA
translation :
o Back up the disk.
o Boot from a DOS floppy, and use fdisk to partition the disk. Leave at
least 50M free, and use the rest for DOS. Format as usual. This
will remove the BIOS extender. Note: the disk will only appear to
be a little over 500M in size. This is a BIOS problem, and is normal.
o Install FreeBSD. Make sure that the root filesystem is smaller than
the amount of space that you left over in the fdisk step before. This
is necessary to allow the bootstrap to load the kernel.
> Greg
Hopefully you can make something useful of that.
--
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[
]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[
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