From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jul 12 05:05:10 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id FAA02367 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 12 Jul 1995 05:05:10 -0700 Received: from casparc.ppp.net (casparc.ppp.net [194.64.12.35]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with SMTP id FAA02358 for ; Wed, 12 Jul 1995 05:05:00 -0700 Received: from ernie by casparc.ppp.net with uucp (Smail3.1.28.1 #1) id m0sW0UM-000HzkC; Wed, 12 Jul 95 14:02 MET DST Received: by ernie.altona.hamburg.com (Smail3.1.29.0 #16) id m0sVzV0-00021gC; Wed, 12 Jul 95 12:58 MET DST Message-Id: From: hm@ernie.altona.hamburg.com (Hellmuth Michaelis) Subject: Re: A problem with disklabel & "use entire disk" on 2.0.5R. To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Date: Wed, 12 Jul 1995 12:58:38 +0200 (MET DST) In-Reply-To: <199507120604.IAA09165@uriah.heep.sax.de> from "J Wunsch" at Jul 12, 95 08:04:27 am Reply-To: hm@altona.hamburg.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1608 Sender: hackers-owner@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk >From the keyboard of J Wunsch: > > I *had* to use the translated geometry to get anything to boot. > > This comes up over and over again. In Usenet. In private mails/talks > i'm getting. I'm not very happy that the slice code broke *many* > systems that used to run before with their dedicated disks. IMHO, we > should have an option to disable the slice code in case somebody > wishes to use a disk dedicated to FreeBSD (perhaps even a non-bootable > disk, so the BIOS braindeadness is in no way a valid reason). There > are many people like me that have "mental" problems with lying about > their disk geometry too much (i.e., forcing a gratuitous number like > 63/31/...) when they know it (at least, partially) better, and the > disk is never to see anything else than (Free)BSD in this life. One of them was me. The system in question has never seen another OS than *BSD and it will never. (It will never see any commercial PC SYSV U*nx, any Microsoft OS, nor any IBM OS). I always used the whole disk for *BSD since 386BSD and it went fine until 2.0.5 ... :-( (Yes, i know, "you have the source, Luke" !) I had to install a small DOS partition (shudder ..) and after i did that, i was able to boot 2.0.5. But it uses a disk geometry which causes another (shudder ...), sigh. So to repeat the original question: is there any drawback in using this totally strange cylinder/head/sector layout i was forced to use ???? hellmuth -- Hellmuth Michaelis hm@altona.hamburg.com Hamburg, Europe (A)bort, (R)etry, (I)nstall BSD ?