From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon May 20 22:51:19 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id WAA29210 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 20 May 1996 22:51:19 -0700 (PDT) Received: from godzilla.zeta.org.au (godzilla.zeta.org.au [203.2.228.19]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id WAA29204 for ; Mon, 20 May 1996 22:51:17 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from bde@localhost) by godzilla.zeta.org.au (8.6.12/8.6.9) id PAA23269; Tue, 21 May 1996 15:47:06 +1000 Date: Tue, 21 May 1996 15:47:06 +1000 From: Bruce Evans Message-Id: <199605210547.PAA23269@godzilla.zeta.org.au> To: dutchman@spase.nl, terry@lambert.org Subject: Re: Glitch in install procedure. Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk >> I just installed FreeBSD as a secondary OS on a machine. I dumped it into the >> upper 300 Mb of a 810 Mb disk. Funny thing is that neither the installation >> procedure, nor booteasy issued a warning that it would not be possible to >> actually boot from the partition, as it is beyond the reach of the BIOS. >That's because it couldn't ask BIOS to tell it what was good. Actually, it's because it couldn't ask ufs for where the blocks in /kernel are. It knows what the BIOS geometry is supposed to be since it just created a partition table that usually won't work unless you told it the BIOS geometry. >Silly FreeBSD, trusted you to know what you were doing. 8-). It's a feature that you can write /kernel on a file system whose partition has BIOS cylinders >= 1024. Silly BSD allows writing to such file systems :-). (Except possibly at install time, there is nothing special about /kernel.). Bruce