Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 00:57:35 -0400 (EDT) From: doug@safeport.com To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: Damon Hammis <squirrel@hammis.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, James Howard <howardjp@glue.umd.edu> Subject: Re: Anyone resolved "Missing operating system" Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0007130036280.4789-100000@pemaquid.safeport.com> In-Reply-To: <20000713094946.C4094@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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Liberally edited for legibility..
On Thu, 13 Jul 2000, Greg Lehey wrote:
[cut] summary - what systems did not work...
> Can you be more specific?
>
> > The answer is two of them: Dell Latitude LM P133 circa 1997 and an LM M166MMX of
> > the same year.
> >
> > Note that the ONLY path that gave me any trouble at all is using a
> > FreeBSD parition only; the option that any sane person would be
> > talked out of by the warnings :)
>
> This option is in fact the best choice, if it works. You waste a lot
> of space with a Microsoft partition table. Here's a partition table
> from a Latitude CPi with two partitions:
Well I thought so too - If I wanted DOS I could run windows eh :)
> Disk name: wd0 FDISK Partition Editor
> DISK Geometry: 789 cyls/255 heads/63 sectors = 12675285 sectors
>
> Offset Size End Name PType Desc Subtype Flags
>
> 0 63 62 - 6 unused 0
> 63 4192902 4192964 wd0s2 2 fat 6
> 4192965 8482320 12675284 wd0s1 3 freebsd 165 C
> 12675285 10395 12685679 - 6 unused 0
>
> Note the 63 sectors at the beginning. One of them is the partition
> table, the other 62 are waste. Also the 10395 (that's right, over 5
> MB) at the end. You can't use this space. With dedicated disks, you
> get the entire disk.
This in fact is the reason I wanted to do this. These are old systems with
pretty small disks.
How much you waste is a function of the geometry; On the LM P133:
Disk name: Disk name: wd0
DISK Geometry: 256 cyls/197 heads/63 sectors = 3177216 sectors
Offset Size End Name PType Desc Subtype Flags
0 63 62 6 unused 0
63 3177153 3177215 wd0s1 3 freebsd 165 C=
So I only lose 32K. It was worse on the other system which is why I tried the
dedicated partition.
> The problem with the Latitude is probably that the BIOS is broken, and
> that it expects to see a Microsoft partition table at the beginning of
> the disk.
I do not believe this to be the case, because I can install 3.4 and not 4.0. In
an earlier post I send sysinstall output for a dedicated partition on one of my
Latitudes running 3.4 and PAO. This is my "production" laptop; it works
flawlessly (excepting for operator error).
> On Wednesday, 12 July 2000 at 18:23:51 -0400, Damon Hammis wrote:
> > On Wed, 12 Jul 2000, James Howard wrote:
[cut]
> >>
> >> Bah, sane is for boring people.
> >>
> >> In the past, I have had no difficulty using "dangerously dedicated."
>
> No, neither have I. But some machines have problems, and it looks
> like Doug has one of them.
If the BIOS is "broken" it is broken in a way that 3.4 can handle. Maybe
something in 4.0 assumes more modern machines??
> > I've used dedicated disks on systems that ran multiple os' without a
> > problem.
>
> How do you do that? You can't use dedicated disks with more than one
> OS.
<:(
_____
Douglas Denault
doug@safeport.com
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