Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 09:52:01 +1200 (NZST) From: Juha Saarinen <juha@saarinen.org> To: "Karsten W. Rohrbach" <karsten@rohrbach.de> Cc: 'Richard Smith' <rdls@rdls.net>, "'Freebsd-Stable@Freebsd. Org'" <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Disk geometry oddity Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0106120947310.5609-100000@vimfuego.saarinen.org> In-Reply-To: <20010611181930.F17891@mail.webmonster.de>
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On Mon, 11 Jun 2001, Karsten W. Rohrbach wrote: > this depends solely on the fact if there is data on the disk (other > partitions) you want to keep. ;-) There is, and I was planning on keeping it. > all the fuzz about geometry of your disks is only important when > booting. when your bios does not grok the layout, you're hosed (box > won't boot). when the kernel is loaded and starts up, the scsi devices > are accessed natively with linear adresses. if you multiboot > (dos/win/...) you should leave the geometry as it is, because you would > step on the feet of microshaft's bootloader which is - ehrm, no pun > intended - still way 80ish, even on win2000, and fucks up without any > useable error messages (very "generic" ones, like "my car does not > run"). Yeah, I know... it's the result of an unholy cabal involving Intel, Microsoft, IBM and that very evil concept called "backward compatibility". These boxes are FreeBSD-only though, which is why they were once set to "dangerously dedicated" (donning flame suit as there's sure to be someone who'll have a go at this statement...) > as a rule of thumb, you should create your "a" partition at the > beginning of the disk. the "a" partition holds the root filesystem, thus > it contains /boot with the loader and custom config. if you are going to > use from big disks with multiboot, create an msdog partition small > enough to create a bootable slice for *bsd which can be reached by bios > addressing. without the well-known "adaptec mapping" with n cylinders, > 255 heads and 63 sectors/track you would not be able to boot partitions > behind the 1GB limit. OK, thanks, that's worth bearing in mind. I think it's mentioned in the FAQ as well. -- Regards, Juha PGP fingerprint: B7E1 CC52 5FCA 9756 B502 10C8 4CD8 B066 12F3 9544 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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