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To: aflundi@sandia.gov (Alan F Lundin)
cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.0.5-Alpha Installation 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 02 Jun 1995 17:01:18 +0200."
             <199506021501.JAA24405@sargon.mdl.sandia.gov> 
Date: Sat, 3 Jun 1995 17:08:34 +0200
From: Julian Howard Stacey <jhs@vector.eikon.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de>
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> How hard would it be to add a
> probe command to the install program that would take a user
> provided absolute sector number (or a cyl/hd/sec number set),
> read that sector and return a read success or failure status.
> That way a user could discover how big their disk really is,
> then from that fake up some cyl/hd/sec values to get as close
> as possible to that max abs sector value. 

The way I sized my disks (using 386bsd or mach way back when)
was to put on a disklable much bigger than possible,
then do a dd if=raw_device of=/dev/null, then take the count & feed it back
to edit a new entry for /etc/disktab

Julian S