From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Dec 28 07:38:31 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id HAA09432 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 28 Dec 1995 07:38:31 -0800 (PST) Received: from genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au (genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au [129.127.96.120]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id HAA09423 for ; Thu, 28 Dec 1995 07:38:23 -0800 (PST) Received: from msmith@localhost by genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au (8.6.12/8.6.9) id CAA03130; Fri, 29 Dec 1995 02:15:38 +1030 From: Michael Smith Message-Id: <199512281545.CAA03130@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Subject: Re: HELP!!! THIS IS AN EMERGENCY (fwd) To: grog@lemis.de Date: Fri, 29 Dec 1995 02:15:38 +1030 (CST) Cc: cosmos@misery.bssc.org, hackers@freebsd.org, jack@cdrom.com In-Reply-To: <199512281149.MAA20604@allegro.lemis.de> from "Greg Lehey" at Dec 28, 95 12:49:38 pm MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk Greg Lehey stands accused of saying: >I don't find this amusing. OK, he may be a jerk, but on the other hand, maybe >he isn't. I'd have to say that anyone that uses the word 'fuck' when they're looking for help isn't worth the effort. That's a bit of a personal standard I guess, but I find it a useful starting point. >He's certainly frustrated, and it would be nice to understand why, >and if there's anything that we can do to ensure that it doesn't happen more >often than absolutely necessary. What was the problem? Basically, he leapt in way over his head and then ran around accusing everyone and everything in sight of being responsible for him 'losing everything'. The "best" solution to the basic problem (no Jordan, no wolves this time 8) would be better detection/interoperation with BIOS extenders. This is kinda problematic though, as none of the deep-down disk hackers consider IDE worthy of their spit, and the technical aspects of the problem are pretty hairy. >From your perspective, as a keen documenter of the installation process, the tips that you can glean from this are : - MAKE A BACKUP - Installing to a disk in a system that is using a BIOS extender such as OnTrack Corporation's Disk Manager is quite risky due to the translation that these programs perform. FreeBSD knows about Disk Manager, and should work OK with it, but other similar programs are not supported, and installing to a disk using such a program will almost certainly render the disk unusable. The 'right' way to install to an IDE disk bigger than 500M that is shared with DOS, when your system does _not_ have a BIOS that does LBA translation : o Back up the disk. o Boot from a DOS floppy, and use fdisk to partition the disk. Leave at least 50M free, and use the rest for DOS. Format as usual. This will remove the BIOS extender. Note: the disk will only appear to be a little over 500M in size. This is a BIOS problem, and is normal. o Install FreeBSD. Make sure that the root filesystem is smaller than the amount of space that you left over in the fdisk step before. This is necessary to allow the bootstrap to load the kernel. > Greg Hopefully you can make something useful of that. -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] "Who does BSD?" "We do Chucky, we do." [[