Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2002 15:30:12 -0400 From: Andy Sparrow <spadger@best.com> To: Andrea Monaldi <magic_mac_96@yahoo.com> Cc: "David " Sieb rger "" <drs@rucus.ru.ac.za>, stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Cannot initialize disklabel Message-ID: <20020727193012.CBF107C@CRWdog.demon.co.uk> In-Reply-To: Message from Andrea Monaldi <magic_mac_96@yahoo.com> of "Sat, 27 Jul 2002 09:26:42 PDT." <20020727162642.95117.qmail@web21504.mail.yahoo.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
[-- Attachment #1 --] > David, > > If I had this it should not work well under Linux and > W2K too, isn't it? > > Anyway it's not this problem. It works bad ONLY in > FreeBSD. Hey all, Every time I've upgraded any HDD since ~4.2, I've attempted to install FreeBSD directly without using any other OS. Each time, it's failed due to fdisk using some strange geometry, which the BIOS can't boot from afterwards (they've almost all been "large" drives, all IDE). I had this problem most recently about a week ago, upgrading my laptop drive to 40GB with a 4.6-RELEASE CD. The workaround mentioned in the handbook (creating a partition from DOS fdisk first), forces fdisk to use a more correct geometry (well, the BIOS can boot from it afterwards, so I presume it's more correct :-), and has never failed to work for me. You can delete or change the type of the partition in sysinstall (I always set up a suspend partition for my laptop, for example), so it's not a big deal for me, but I agree that it's horribly confusing, not well (as in In-Yer-Face) documented, likely to cause much frustration for first-time or infrequent installers and it'd be nice if the problem went away or fdisk just DTRT. There was, IIRC, a thread on how/why complicated this was to do properly on this very list some months ago. HTH. Cheers, AS [-- Attachment #2 --] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (FreeBSD) Comment: Exmh version 2.5 07/13/2001 iD8DBQE9QvTEPHh895bDXeQRAkolAJ9YjjpvY2+sToEEUSv0g7EmLjtPpwCeJGBi oD/YeWRpMhNjg3S3RdwobSQ= =LLxJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20020727193012.CBF107C>