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Date:           Sun, 27 Oct 1996 11:05:59 -0500
From:      "Drew Derbyshire" <ahd@kew.com>
To:        "Barry Soben" <bsoben@gauss.elee.calpoly.edu>
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:     Re: Hard Drive Partitioning
Message-ID:  <3273886f.kendra@pandora.kew.com>

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On Sat, 26 Oct 1996 21:28:02 -0700, "Barry Soben" <bsoben@gauss.elee.calpoly.edu> wrote:
> Using partition magic, I partitioned my 1 gig hard drive 600 megs for MSDOS
> and 400 megs for FreeBSD.  Presently the 400 megs is "free space", it does
> not have any sort of partition format.  In reading "Installing and Running
> FreeBSD", I couldn't quite figure out whether I'm best off just running FIPS
> or using Partition Magic to set those 400 megs to some sort of file system..
> (Not sure which one!)  Help!

No, leave it free and let FreeBSD find the empty space.  I _think_ you
need the DOS data broken into two parts, because the 600M will require
the first 1024+ cylinders, and FreeBSd (like most systems) must boot
from within that area, being the root partition of the FreeBSD disk
slice must start around Megabyte 470.

If the DOS is akready split into a primary and extended partition, move
the extended partition to the end of the disk with Partition Magic; make
each partition less than 256M, and you'll recover much of the lost space
in smaller cluster sizes (PM will recluster for you if you ask it).

If you have one big primary partition, you're using 16K clusters which
eat disk space anyway ... create an extended partition in the last 255M
of the 400M, copy a reasonable amount of data to it, then shrink the
primary partition to 255M.

See the Partition Magic docs for further comments on why to use smaller
partitions and the affect on cluster sizes.

In any case, let FreeBSD create the new partition, works fine.  (I did.)

-ahd-
-- 
Internet:       ahd@kew.com             Voice:          617-279-9810

"In space, no one can hear you forget."         - David M. Watt



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