From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Oct 7 9:16:39 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from drawbridge.ascend.com (drawbridge.ascend.com [198.4.92.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 07B5715097 for ; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 09:16:30 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kvigor@shihtzu.eng.ascend.com) Received: from fw-ext.ascend.com (fw-ext [198.4.92.5]) by drawbridge.ascend.com (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with SMTP id JAA15088 for ; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 09:09:40 -0700 (PDT) Received: from russet.ascend.com by fw-ext.ascend.com via smtpd (for drawbridge.ascend.com [198.4.92.1]) with SMTP; 7 Oct 1999 16:14:47 UT Received: from wopr.eng.ascend.com (wopr.eng.ascend.com [206.65.212.178]) by russet.ascend.com (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id JAA08197 for ; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 09:14:47 -0700 (PDT) Received: from shihtzu.eng.ascend.com (shihtzu.eng.ascend.com [204.253.164.44]) by wopr.eng.ascend.com (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id JAA15883 for ; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 09:16:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from kvigor@localhost) by shihtzu.eng.ascend.com (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) id KAA16843 for freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 10:14:46 -0600 (MDT) Message-ID: X-Mailer: XFMail 1.3 [p0] on Solaris X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Thu, 07 Oct 1999 10:14:46 -0600 (MDT) Organization: Lucent Technologies InterNetworking Systems From: Kevin Vigor To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Hello & boot > cylinder 1024 suggestion Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hello all, it's my first time, so please be gentle... I'm not sure if this is the right list for this issue (freebsd-install looks better, but is closed, at least according to the charter), so please redirect me if necessary. I was recently annoyed to find that I cannot install/boot FreeBSD from a hard drive partition extending beyond cylinder 1024 (not a problem unique to FreeBSD by any means...). Even with LBA support, this translates to an 8-gig limit (i.e. the boot partition must be completely within the first 8 gigs of the hard drive). Now that 20-gig & greater drives are commonly available, this becomes a real and annoying limitation. It occurred to me that a potential solution for this problem is to use an IDE specific interface in the boot process, thus side-stepping the stone-age BIOS int 13 interface (whence the 1024 cylinder limit originates). This would involve writing an IDE specific MBR loader (an adaptation of BootEZ) and adapting BTX similarly. This obviously doesn't help SCSI users, but does solve my problem nicely. I have done some basic hacking and convinced myself that this is possible using IDE PIO mode (inefficient, but hardly a major concern for the boot loader). This would obviously also require some alterations to the install process: it would need to detect an IDE interface and then allow installing the IDE specific boot sectors and installing onto a partition > 1024. So, questions: has anybody thought of this before? I couldn't find any reference to such a project anywhere, but it seems relatively obvious. Does this sound like a idea worth pursuing? And assuming that the previous answers are no and yes respectively, is there anyone who can/would assist with the install integration/testing portion of this (I am confident of my ability to code the MBR/BTX changes, but much less confident of my understanding on the install process). Peace, Kevin To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message