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Date: Thu, 04 Aug 2005 17:01:39 -0500
From: Martin McCormick <martin@dc.cis.okstate.edu>
Subject: Re: Dell PowerEdge1850 Won't Take a Freebsd4.11 Installation. 
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	A Dell PowerEdge1850 will, in fact take a FreeBSD4.11
installation.  This problem has been solved.

	It turns out that Dell Computers only supports a particular
version of Redhat at this time.  They put a special partition on the
drives shipped with PowerEdge 1850's that is about 50 MB which is some
sort of diagnostic tool they use.  It has the side effect of
absolutely trashing many other Linux distributions and FreeBSD4.11,
possibly FreeBSD5.4, also although we didn't try it.

	For some reason, the fdisk utility on a Windows98 boot disk is
Draconian enough to blow away the special partition and then
everything works like normal.

	Thanks to those who had helpful suggestions.  It turned out
not to be FreeBSD's fault at all.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group