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Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2015 12:39:29 -0700 (MST)
From: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com>
To: John McDonnell <mcdonnjd@pcam.org>
cc: FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: RE: POS system trashing hard drives during install
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On Mon, 21 Dec 2015, John McDonnell wrote:

> Apologizing in advance if the formatting of this gets all out of 
> whack. Don't have a handy way of doing a copy and paste from up here 
> where I have an old system with PATA connectors. So I'm typing by hand 
> on my phone. Though, thinking about it now, maybe I should have done 
> this from the POS since it will boot the XP disk. Maybe it will show 
> something different. Anyway, here goes:
>
> root@:~ # gpart show ada0
> =>          63  78165297  ada0  MBR  (37G)
>              63  40965687  1         ntfs [active]  (20G)
> 40965750  37190475  2         ebr  (18G)
> 78156225           9135             - free -   (4.5M)
>
> =>             0  37190475 ada0s2  EBR (18G)
>                 0  37190475             1 ntfs  (18G)
>
> That looks like a pretty normal layout to me. Guessing that there 
> might be something special inside the MBR itself or something in the 
> "empty" sectors. Is there some other command than "gpart show" that 
> would be helpful?

Look at what partitions are present in the second slice:
gpart show ada0s2