From owner-freebsd-stable Sat Jul 27 14:41:15 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.FreeBSD.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AA07337B400 for ; Sat, 27 Jul 2002 14:41:11 -0700 (PDT) Received: from pc1-cove2-4-cust33.bir.cable.ntl.com (pc1-cove2-4-cust33.bir.cable.ntl.com [80.4.78.33]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BA20843E42 for ; Sat, 27 Jul 2002 14:41:10 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ianjhart@ntlworld.com) Received: from ntlworld.com (alpha.private.lan [192.168.0.2]) by pc1-cove2-4-cust33.bir.cable.ntl.com (8.12.3/8.12.3) with ESMTP id g6RLexgA074193; Sat, 27 Jul 2002 22:41:01 +0100 (BST) (envelope-from ianjhart@ntlworld.com) Message-ID: <3D43136B.6090801@ntlworld.com> Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2002 22:40:59 +0100 From: ian j hart User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020718 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Andy Sparrow Cc: Andrea Monaldi , David Sieb rger , stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Cannot initialize disklabel References: <20020727193012.CBF107C@CRWdog.demon.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Andy Sparrow wrote: >> 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. Are you seriously saying that you have NEVER managed to install FBSD without this kludge? If I were you I'd have complained by now. > > 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 > I'd have been more active on this thread if my CCs to the list had arrived. -- ian j hart To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message