From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Jul 8 04:28:08 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id EAA12147 for questions-outgoing; Tue, 8 Jul 1997 04:28:08 -0700 (PDT) Received: from glacier.wise.edt.ericsson.se (glacier-ext.wise.edt.ericsson.se [193.180.251.38]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id EAA12140 for ; Tue, 8 Jul 1997 04:28:05 -0700 (PDT) Received: from erlang (erlang.ericsson.se [147.214.36.16]) by glacier.wise.edt.ericsson.se (8.7.5/8.7.3/glacier-0.9) with SMTP id NAA02394; Tue, 8 Jul 1997 13:20:57 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from townsend.ericsson.se by erlang (SMI-8.6/LME-2.2.4) id NAA14727; Tue, 8 Jul 1997 13:20:49 +0200 Received: from townsend by townsend.ericsson.se (SMI-8.6/client-1.5) id NAA01323; Tue, 8 Jul 1997 13:20:48 +0200 Message-Id: <199707081120.NAA01323@townsend.ericsson.se> To: steveh@cetus.digicon-brs.com.au Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: kent@erlang.ericsson.se Subject: Re: Vanishing FreeBSD Partitions Reply-To: kent@erlang.ericsson.se In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 8 Jul 1997 18:45:08 +1100 (AEST)" References: X-Mailer: Mew version 1.70 on Emacs 19.34.1 X-URL: http://www.ericsson.se/erlang Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Tue, 08 Jul 1997 13:20:47 +0200 From: Kent Boortz Sender: owner-questions@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Do you write to your DOS partition from FreeBSD? This is probably not relevant to your setup but I managed to do a very stupid thing.... I had a disk crash (my fault) so I removed the old partitions and repartitioned the drive. Discovered that Windows95 was still there. Great. I ran 'defrag' and 'scandisk' to verify that the Win95 partition was ok. I was lazy and thought "Why not keep it". I will never do that again. I installed FreeBSD on a partition (slice) above the Win95 partition. I knew the new partitions wasn't exactly as big as the old ones. The Win95 partition happened to be a little smaller than before. This moved the FreeBSD partition down on the disk. Problem was that I assumed that the information a OS uses about a partition was taken from a central block on the disk, not locally in the partition itself. So Windows95 thought it was having a larger partition than I gave it. In effect I had two overlapping partitions! I didn't find out about that until I installed some more games on the Windows95 partition and filled that partition up. It wiped out the first part of the FreeBSD partition. The "/etc" directory was completely gone 8-( I'm still not sure what I should have done to remove the Win95 partition completely. Removing the partition in fdisk didn't help. I suspect that a format would have used the information inside the partition as well. And after getting into this disaster I had trouble fixing this problem because fdisk got confused when the partition map and the information inside the partition didn't match and refused to take away the partition. I don't even remember how I finally solved it after hours of "trail and error". /kgb