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Date:      Fri, 3 Mar 2000 11:53:36 +1030
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        Kevin Leung <kleung@padc22.pa.dec.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Q: is there any problems in having the FreeBSD root partition above the 1024 cylinder mark?
Message-ID:  <20000303115336.M12352@freebie.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.4.04.10002291726230.28012-100000@padc22.pa.dec.com>
References:  <Pine.OSF.4.04.10002291726230.28012-100000@padc22.pa.dec.com>

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On Tuesday, 29 February 2000 at 17:33:26 -0800, Kevin Leung wrote:
> I will be getting a 20GB IDE drive as the second hard drive for
> my computer.  I want to have a triple boot system or more. First
> hard drive was dedicated to Win98<sucks, don't ask>.  For this
> second drive, I plan to have a FAT32, FreeBSD, and BeOS slices.
> What is the constraints on how I place FreeBSD?  Does the
> current boot manager allow FreeBSD slices to sit above the 1024
> cylinder mark.
>
> Can a FreeBSD slice start below the 1024 cylinder mark and the
> root partition to be under the mark, but the slice to end above
> the 1024 cylinder mark?

FreeBSD has always supported the root file system anywhere on the
disk.  The issue is how you get FreeBSD started: you need the BIOS to
load the kernel.

Many older BIOSes were restricted to the 1023 cylinder limit you
mention.  It always works as long as the root file system is entirely
below the 1023 cylinder mark, regardless of how large the FreeBSD
slice is.  But it's possible it's not a problem at all: as far as I
know, this restriction doesn't apply to any BIOSes made in the last
year or two.  There's only one way to find out for sure: try it.  If
it doesn't work, it at least shouldn't break anything, though you
should always make a backup before installing a new system if there's
anything of value you want to leave on the disk.

> I might have my slice and partition definition switched.  I am
> using slice to represent the thing that holds multiple
> partitions (/, /tmp, /var, /usr).

Yes, that's the correct way round.  A slice is a Microsoft
"partition".

Greg
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