From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Apr 11 23:57:19 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from freebie.lemis.com (freebie.lemis.com [192.109.197.137]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 312D637BA6B for ; Tue, 11 Apr 2000 23:57:14 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog@freebie.lemis.com) Received: (from grog@localhost) by freebie.lemis.com (8.9.3/8.9.0) id QAA37650; Wed, 12 Apr 2000 16:27:05 +0930 (CST) Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 16:27:05 +0930 From: Greg Lehey To: Micke Josefsson Cc: FreeBSD Questions Subject: Re: "dangerously dedicated" Message-ID: <20000412162705.O35391@freebie.lemis.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0pre2i In-Reply-To: WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-41-739-7062 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG [Format recovered--see http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html] On Wednesday, 12 April 2000 at 8:40:05 +0200, Micke Josefsson wrote: > > On 12-Apr-00 `ekips wrote: >> when making partitions with /stand/sysinstall, i decided to press >> "A" and got the following message: >> >> "Do you want to do this with a true partition entry so as to remain >> cooperative with any future operating systemss on the drive(s)?" >> >> ... and then points me to the FreeBSD FAQ, where i could not find >> any info on the subject. where can i find good documentation on >> this? or even better, could someone explain all the ramifications >> of my two options [yes/no]. thanx. > > In short: Normally a disk consists of up to 4 primary partitions (or > three primary and one extended, which can contain infinately many > extended partitions). A table at the beginning of the disk has space > for four pointers to these four regions on disk. A dangerously > dedicated disk ignores this table and starts using the disk from its > very beginning, as a result of this you cannot afterwards repartition > your disk to make space for (shudder) windows. This works all right > for FreeBSD: If you have no intention of installing anything but > FreeBSD on it then go straight ahead with 'dangerously dedicated'. > > You can still erase the entire disk and partition it with dos's fdisk > later if you want - but you'll lose the your FreeBSD installation > then. This is a frequently cited reason, but when you think about it, it doesn't make much sense: even if the disk has a Microsoft partition table, if you assign the entire disk to FreeBSD, you can repartition, but you'll lose the FreeBSD installation. Greg -- When replying to this message, please take care not to mutilate the original text. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/email.html Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message