From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Sep 3 17:55:58 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1014616A4BF for ; Wed, 3 Sep 2003 17:55:58 -0700 (PDT) Received: from gmsi1.com (mail01.gmsi1.com [64.210.75.20]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D293044008 for ; Wed, 3 Sep 2003 17:55:56 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from meow_cat@searchbug.com) Received: from [68.32.127.134] (account ) by gmsi1.com (CommuniGate Pro WebUser 4.0.5) with HTTP id 16293600 for ; Wed, 03 Sep 2003 19:54:12 -0500 From: "Meow Cat" To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG X-Mailer: CommuniGate Pro Web Mailer v.4.0.5 Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2003 19:54:12 -0500 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"; format="flowed" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Subject: 5.1-RELEASE: disklabel/bsdlabel for multi-boot system X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 04 Sep 2003 00:55:58 -0000 Hi, Before starting, I should say that I've RTFM'd, looked in the FAQ and the mailing lists, etc. I've seen lots of people complaining about similar problems but no answers. I have an existing partition table, and I'd like FreeBSD to fit into it with as little damage to the existing OSs as possible. The setup I have (as reported by OpenBSD disklabel) is: a: 262144 257040 4.2BSD 1024 8192 16 b: 16384 519184 swap c: 498015 257040 unused 0 0 d: 219487 535568 4.2BSD 1024 8192 16 e: 4000122 6747363 4.2BSD 1024 8192 16 i: 256977 63 ext2fs l: 5992245 755055 MSDOS m: 45351432 10747548 MSDOS n: 32001417 56099043 MSDOS o: 32001417 88100523 MSDOS It took me ages to figure out how to achieve this under OpenBSD, and then after install I couldn't get X to work. So I'm trying FreeBSD - of course bsdlabel only supports slices a-h for some reason that is never explained, so I have to delete half of the slices. Fine, I do that. So with a heavily edited label file I try: bsdlabel -R /dev/ad2s0 bsdlabel_file Every slice starts "after end of unit" and "extends beyond end of unit." The c slice "doesn't cover entire unit!" Okay, I can deal with that, I think - just extend the c slice to cover the entire disk, use "bsdlabel -A" (after a "bsdlabel -w") to read the disk configuration and edit it to ensure that it's not broken, and try again. I get the same errors. How can the first slice possibly begin "after end of unit" and what do I do to fix this? How are these "unit"-related numbers calculated? Does "unit"===entire-hard-disk? Why does this fail even when I make the c slice cover the entire hard disk? Also, I'd like to have the a slice to be a small one from the main partition table, and /usr mounted on a larger slice within the extended partition table. I managed this under OpenBSD with the table above - is there a problem (other than the one I mentioned) with using this type of table in FreeBSD? Finally, before you tell me to try sysinstall - I tried it. I'm sure it has its uses, but the interactive fdisk part is unable to understand extended partitions, and the interactive disklabel does not allow you to specify your own begin/end for slices, either in sectors, or in cyl/trk/head. So it's useless for my purposes. The only possible use I can see for it is for people who want to devote their entire machine to FreeBSD. That's something I noticed in OpenBSD also - both OSs seem about 10 years behind when it comes to supporting mutli-boot systems :( Anyway, any help would be appreciated... ______________________________________________________ Find People and Businesses at http://www.SearchBug.com Innovative Messaging Solutions by GMSI, http://www.gmsi1.com