Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
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
--==_Exmh_2135505148P
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

> 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 Fr=
eeBSD 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 afterwa=
rds (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 f=
disk 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 alway=
s set up a suspend partition for my laptop, for example), so it's not a b=
ig 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 fd=
isk 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


--==_Exmh_2135505148P
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature

-----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-----

--==_Exmh_2135505148P--

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20020727193012.CBF107C>