Date: Thu, 28 Dec 1995 14:38:52 +1030 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: mitch@carroll.com (Mitch Friedman) Cc: questions@freebsd.org, zeleps@hol.gr, support@cdrom.com, info@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Trouble with installing FREEBSD Message-ID: <199512280408.OAA00958@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <199512240045.TAA05723@carroll.com> from "Mitch Friedman" at Dec 23, 95 07:45:35 pm
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Firstly, Mitch old buddy, get a mail program that understands how lines are supposed to be wrapped. I'll be nice and reformat this message, but bear in mind that many people would simply ignore it because it's too much effort to read. > I have a 250M C-disk which is my boot-up dos disk and a 1.08G >d-disk, that I use desire to use for both unix and dos since it is big >enough to hold dos based program, as well as unix stuff. I used >presizer, v.1.1.2 to partition the d-disk into a 600 mb Dos partition >and a 400 mb non-Dos partition, for UNIX-FreeBSD. I admit I was a This is an unworkable configuration if your system is IDE-based. You must have the entire root filesystem below the 1024-cylinder mark to be able to boot. (This is a BIOS limitation). >little to ambitious and wanted to load the bin, gnu, games, and other >source files. Obviously the 400mb would not be enough. But Freebsd >doesn't care, like any other Unix o/s, and tried to load it. Of >course it wrote over into some parts of the Dos partition (how do I >know this...see below!)-no not a internet smile a real exclamation pt >and a parenthesis- FreeBSD would only have written over the DOS partition if the partition table was incorrect. I would suspect the "presizer" utility. You should have read the installation notes and use the "fips" program supplied. It has been tested on countless systems and is known to work well. >I rebooted with a dos diskette and guess what?!? My d-disk was gone! >I checked with fdisk and presizer to see what the hell was going on >with my d-disk Well, my 1.08G d-disk turned into a 507 mb d-disk, in >which only 478.5 mb could be reconfigured or formatted into a d-disk You are (were) using a BIOS-extender such as OnTrack's Disk Manager. These tools work by revectoring the BIOS disk function entrypoints and are, as a rule, incompatible with any operating system other than DOS. Note that FreeBSD does generally support interoperation with DiskManager. The "presizer" tool may also have corrupted the partition table due to the presence of this BIOS extender. > Anyway, I spent six hours trying to recover my @$%@$!!~#%$^&@$%&$ >d-disk. I could not regain the lost partition with presizer or fdisk! >Re-formatting did squat! Until I took the disk utilities that came >with my d-disk, re-initialized the d-disk, powered my pc down and up, >reformat the d-disk. Then and only then was I able to recover my >d-disk in total!!!! However, since I had to re-initialize and >re-format my disk I subsequently blew-away some important programs, >such as TRUMPET and EUDORA and other internet goodies that I >painstakingly down-loaded. I spent a good portion of the night >redown-loading this stuff!! Why did you not perform a backup before the installation? It is _EXPLICITLY_ stated in the installation instructions that you should perform a _FULL_BACKUP_ before installing. > This should not have happened!! Is there a back-out or fail-safe >utility that can be used in case something like this happens, in which >I can recover my disk with out destroying it. Is there a switch that >can be used with presizer to look at the total disk, instead of the >dos partition? Is there a switch or utility that can be used with the >installation that can warn me when I attempt to choose something that >will take up to much space on my disk? Your problems are several; you are attempting to use a fundamentally bogus disk configuration which only works due to the addition of fundamentally bogus software, with an operating system that has a very different idea of things. You can do this, but you need to take a different approach, and in particular, come to grips with the fact that PC hardware, _particularly_ IDE, is crap, and that much of the software that you are currently using is merely perpetuating design decisions that were bad when they were made 10 or 15 years ago, and simply ludicrous now. > HELP!!!! I WOULD REALLLLY LIKE TO RUN THIS THING, BUT I WILL NOT >LOAD IT UNTIL I AM CONFIDENT THAT I WILL NOT DAMAGE MY COMPUTER, DISK, >OR SANITY!!!! OTHERWISE, I WILL HAVE TO RETURN THIS PIECE OF SOFTWARE >AND ASK FOR A FULL REFUND!!! If you're not confident about the whole thing, then a refund is a good idea. Alternatively, you can shop for some new hardware, take some advice from here and run with it. In summary, probably the best approach you can take is : Back up _everything_. Swap the 250M and 1G disks so that you boot DOS and have all of that stuff on the 1G disk. Install FreeBSD on the _entire_ 250M disk, but do _not_ install the bootmanager. Get the OS-BS bootmanager off the CD, and run the install program under _DOS_ having booted from the 1G disk. This will avoid the problems that will otherwise arise using the stupid BIOS-extender that is at the beginning of the 1G disk, but it is a bit of work. The _right_ choice for you would have been to use SCSI disks, where all this crap is irrelevant. > Mitch Friedman -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] "Who does BSD?" "We do Chucky, we do." [[
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