From owner-freebsd-questions  Mon May 13 09:19:53 1996
Return-Path: owner-questions
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id JAA02071
          for questions-outgoing; Mon, 13 May 1996 09:19:53 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from diablo.ppp.de (diablo.ppp.de [193.141.101.34])
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id JAA02065
          for <questions@freebsd.org>; Mon, 13 May 1996 09:19:50 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from allegro.lemis.de by diablo.ppp.de with smtp
	(Smail3.1.28.1 #1) id m0uJ0LV-000QYtC; Mon, 13 May 96 18:19 MET DST
From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey)
Organisation: LEMIS, Schellnhausen 2, 36325 Feldatal, Germany
Phone: +49-6637-919123
Fax:   +49-6637-919122
Received: (grog@localhost) by allegro.lemis.de (8.6.9/8.6.9) 
	id RAA12996; Mon, 13 May 1996 17:58:59 +0200
Message-Id: <199605131558.RAA12996@allegro.lemis.de>
Subject: Re: harddisks
To: hoek@freenet.hamilton.on.ca (Tim Vanderhoek)
Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 17:58:58 +0200 (MET DST)
Cc: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu, questions@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960512041152.21012B-100000@james.freenet.hamilton.on.ca> from "Tim Vanderhoek" at May 12, 96 04:19:21 am
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

Tim Vanderhoek writes:
>
> On Sat, 11 May 1996, Doug White wrote:
>
>> Shouldn't be much of a problem, as long as the root partition is below
>> 500MB or so.
>
> I see this number a lot, and I assumed this was because the partition
> must be below 512MB in order to be bootable.  However, my hdd is split
> into one msdos partition, 1.1GB, and 430MB FreeBSD one.  The dos
> partition is first.  The FreeBSD sure _seems_ bootable!  (I haven't
> actually tried it, because the floppy install bombed halfway and /kernel
> wasn't copied yet, but the FreeBSD bootloader (is that the right term?  I
> mean that funky thing where you can enter '?' to get a file list of the
> root directory, or enter -cCs etc) starts finely).  Does the limit only
> apply when you install something like OS-BS?

No, the limit is due to severe brain damage in PC hardware,
specifically IDE drives and the BIOS.  You shouldn't have any such
restriction with SCSI, and if your machine has a less restrictive
BIOS, you won't have problems with IDE disks either.

Greg