From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Aug 5 01:08:33 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C17F7106566B for ; Tue, 5 Aug 2008 01:08:33 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from slickwillbo42@yahoo.com) Received: from n3b.bullet.mail.ac4.yahoo.com (n3b.bullet.mail.ac4.yahoo.com [76.13.13.73]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 6AD7E8FC21 for ; Tue, 5 Aug 2008 01:08:33 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from slickwillbo42@yahoo.com) Received: from [76.13.13.26] by n3.bullet.mail.ac4.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 05 Aug 2008 01:02:52 -0000 Received: from [76.13.10.183] by t3.bullet.mail.ac4.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 05 Aug 2008 01:02:52 -0000 Received: from [127.0.0.1] by omp124.mail.ac4.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 05 Aug 2008 01:02:52 -0000 X-Yahoo-Newman-Property: ymail-3 X-Yahoo-Newman-Id: 424391.70958.bm@omp124.mail.ac4.yahoo.com Received: (qmail 21570 invoked by uid 60001); 5 Aug 2008 01:02:52 -0000 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=s1024; d=yahoo.com; h=Received:X-Mailer:Date:From:Subject:To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Message-ID; b=0+FD4/dHtIDufOBDQ+eaMsM7HckGDrVTPrmsWHRNU/ODAeZJ+d9eBzDNxJci93/YTMrgZDAkpsbopUg9Ks+vnZgfxb795lRdzqcKhbgya0n8lRLCiQJKZoPK1cCb2OcNxxUgsO/+Nrzph0oKvD9ABykqzL2v0lkfPdylUEqDbY0=; Received: from [67.124.39.48] by web59816.mail.ac4.yahoo.com via HTTP; Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:02:52 PDT X-Mailer: YahooMailRC/1042.48 YahooMailWebService/0.7.218 Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2008 18:02:52 -0700 (PDT) From: Slick Bo To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Message-ID: <329482.19217.qm@web59816.mail.ac4.yahoo.com> X-Mailman-Approved-At: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:00:55 +0000 Subject: Sorry - plaintext this time - Disk geometry and two OSes. X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:08:33 -0000 Hi everyone, I have two 37GB (nominally 40GB) IDE/ATA disk drives. I'm trying to leave my Windows XP SP1 installation on the one that shows up as "0" (ad0 in sysinstall), and giving the entire other drive to FreeBSD. When creating a boot agent for the 0 drive, sysinstall complains about incorrect disk geometry. I have tried checking the geometry of my disks. However, my BIOS does not display it. The only information it displays about each disk is the capacity in megabytes (40000 MB), and the "type" (whether it's "auto" or "off"). And pfdisk.exe doesn't work; it's reportedly not allowed to directly access the disk. I considered running chkdsk, but it seems it needs to run at boot time in order for it to actually check the 0 drive, and I have no way of catching the output (microsoft claims it dumps information into an event log, but it doesn't, or I can't find it in the place they claim). One other note. On my 0 drive, there are two primary partitions. The first one is a 30 MB FAT partition with the label msdosfs/DellUtility (my computer is a Dell). I'm assuming the boot information is on this partition... will sysinstall know to put the bootloader on that partition? I've seen a few people on this mailing list say that disk geometry really doesn't matter that much, and the OS usually works fine despite apparent errors. But I'd prefer to be able to keep my windows installation. If I let sysinstall change the disk geometry, will it create problems for the files on "0" and the WinXP installation? If so, do you know of an alternate way to find the disk geometry, and should I directly give these results to sysinstall? Will that fix my problem? Alright, I appreciate it. Thanks a lot in advance, Will L.