From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jul 12 21:58:53 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from pemaquid.safeport.com (pemaquid.safeport.com [204.156.12.58]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BFC7F37B5AB for ; Wed, 12 Jul 2000 21:58:48 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from doug@safeport.com) Received: from localhost (doug@localhost) by pemaquid.safeport.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id AAA06187; Thu, 13 Jul 2000 00:57:35 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from doug@safeport.com) From: doug@safeport.com X-Authentication-Warning: pemaquid.safeport.com: doug owned process doing -bs Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 00:57:35 -0400 (EDT) To: Greg Lehey Cc: Damon Hammis , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, James Howard Subject: Re: Anyone resolved "Missing operating system" In-Reply-To: <20000713094946.C4094@wantadilla.lemis.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message