Date: Thu, 29 Jun 1995 15:17:57 -0600 From: WOOD JAMEY RYAN <woodjr@Colorado.EDU> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Dos partition problems after a bad 2.0.5R installation Message-ID: <199506292117.PAA14878@benji.Colorado.EDU>
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I posted this same problem to comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc a few days ago, but didn't come up with any suggestions... I installed 2.0.5R several days ago, and things went fine at first. But on the fifth or sixth boot, it came up with "panic: cannot mount root." Since I didn't have too much to loose at that point, I decided to just start over from scratch. But this time things didn't go so well. I noticed that dos's fdisk was suddenly totally useless. It will tell me it's doing anything I ask, but things are exactly as they originally were, after a reboot. Since then, I've been able to create a dos partition exactly once. I ran an old version of norton disk doctor (4.5), and it recognized that something was wrong and "searched the disk for dos partitions to rebuild the partition table." After that, fdisk showed a trashed partition table, but did let me delete everything and make a new dos partition. Unfortunately, I chose to make around 200 megs of the 515 meg HD a dos partition. But dos thought it had all 515 megs. Fdisk would show the partition as being 200 megs, but the dir would show 500 or so megs free, and freebsd also felt that dos had right to the whole disk, as it wouldn't recognize having room to install itself. So I did another dos fdisk to try to fix the dos partition. It deleted that dos partition, but is now back to its impotent mode... Won't create any dos partitions (or do anything else). And the norton disk doctor trick isn't working anymore (I've tried it many times). Freebsd doesn't seem to have any problems creating its partitions, by the way. And my drive is a Maxtor "540 meg" IDE drive. I've tried the fdisks from dos 5.0, 6.2, and 6.22... Unless I've totally forgotten, I'm sure I put in the correct geometry for my HD during that first freebsd 2.0.5 installation. The only thing I know of that I did wrong was telling it to leave the MBR alone, thinking I could use my current installation of os-bs without change. Could this have somehow caused these problems? So does anyone have any ideas? Or any insight about how freebsd and dos approach partitioning differently that could lead to freebsd's still working, and dos's being totally fried? I'm just at a complete loss and would appreciate any suggestions, pointers, anything. Thanks, Jamey Wood
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