Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 13:33:49 +1000 From: Greg Black <gjb@comkey.com.au> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: Kenneth Chiu <chiuk@cs.indiana.edu>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, gjb@alpha.comkey.com.au Subject: Re: BSD filesystems & MBR Message-ID: <19990221033349.8281.qmail@alpha.comkey.com.au> In-Reply-To: <19990221104540.V93492@lemis.com> of Sun, 21 Feb 1999 10:45:40 %2B1030 References: <19990220010713.3722.qmail@alpha.comkey.com.au> <Pine.BSF.3.96.990220120830.691A-100000@bakery.chiu.nom> <19990221104540.V93492@lemis.com>
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> >>> Optionally, but not recommended, you can make the disk "dangerously > >>> dedicated". > >> > >> I keep seeing references that repeat this advice, but I have not > >> seen any compelling reasons for it. Is there any real reason > >> why, on a machine that will never run anything but FreeBSD, this > >> could present a problem? > > > > The only "real" reason that I know of is the one that came across > > the lists recently. As I understand it, the BIOS on a particular > > machine gets confused by the absence of a "normal" partition table, > > causing it to pass bogus data to the boot blocks. > > Correct, I've heard this too. I've seen a lot of discussion on the > subject, and I'm no wiser. Some claim that dangerously dedicated > disks don't work at all with modern BIOSes; others make a distinction > between safely dedicated and dangerously dedicated. All don't supply > enough information to convince me, but I haven't had time to look at > it myself. I've been using the equivalent of "dangerously dedicated" disks on both IDE and SCSI disks on a range of PCs from a 486-33 that dates back to 1991 up to boxes built in the last couple of weeks running various releases of BSD/OS and FreeBSD. I have never had any problems with this, and don't expect to (since I'll only ever switch to different BSD versions). I certainly don't buy the theory about dangerously dedicated disks not working at all with modern BIOSes -- unless this is something that is supposed to show up in random use some time after a successful installation, which sounds far-fetched to me. I'm guessing here, but it looks as though any problems should declare themselves when you first install to a new disk if they are going to happen at all. Does anybody have an informed opinion on this last theory? -- Greg Black <gjb@acm.org> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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