Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 20:13:18 +0200 (CEST) From: "Hartmann, O." <ohartman@klima.physik.uni-mainz.de> To: <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org> Subject: FreeBSD - Linux curiosity Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.33.0106121953520.17963-100000@klima.physik.uni-mainz.de>
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Dear Sirs. Well, this is a small story about accusing FreeBSD to 'implant' a Linux-unreadable filesystem on a Samsung harddrive (ATA100). I'm the system's operator for a small set of servers running all FreeBSD 4.3-STABLE and we are using FreeBSD as our backbone for over 5 years now with great success and without any catastrophy, except several minor problems, like NFS tricks, but nothing that had not been solved withing one or two weeks for ALL FreeBSD users, so far a problem has been revealed as a bug. For our scientists it is necessary to be 'popular' and use the right operating system and therefore most of them want Linux, because they want it due the fact all others have it also. For this reason we got several new fast Intel based computers and two are based on a ABIT PC133 mainbord with the HighPoint 370 ATA100/RAID controller. One machine has been switched to Windows 2000 because the user needs Windows 2000 on this machine, but before, I installed FreeBSD 4.3-BETA and 4.3-RC for three times with great success and without any problem. Windows 2000 won't install itself due several problems with the HighPoint controller ... The second machine was the same: three times I installed FreeBSD from the ISO image CD without any problem ... The latter machine is to be a Linux machine now - but Linux (SuSE 7.0 and SuSE 7.1) won't install on the system (ABIT133) and after checking the compatibility list of SuSE's homepage we got the information that there are still several problems with the HighPoint RAID controller. The main problem of the Linux installation procedure was, that Linux recognized several uneraseable partitions, marked as "BSD" partition of strange sizes (partition / has a size of 1GB in blocks, but I installed a /-partition of 256 MB only ...). After using a radical DOS utility to repartition the harddisk the Linux loader told us the same and for the first time the guy from our computing center told us that this is a problem caused by FreeBSD - the evidence was given by the 'fdisk' from Linux showing BSD partitions ... huh??? Then we chenaged the mainboard after we read the compatibility list at SuSE's homepage. Now this system is equippted with a ASUS CUV4X-D mainboard with only one CPU at 1GHz - I run the same board with two 800EB CPUs under FreeBSD with a great success (but with a AMI MegaRAID Elite 1600 and a Adpaptec 2940UW SCSI subsystem, not ATA). The same guy from our computing center came back to reinstall Linux again - with no success, because Linux still reports massiv problems in reading or being unable to read the partition table of the disk. It seems there are still FreeBSD or any BSD typed partition remains. Well, I'm not a guru but it seems to me that a 'BSD' type partition is common such a way, that each unrecognized or scrambled partition is recognized as BSD type ... and Linux seems to have massive problems. FreeBSD could be installed without problems - but my chief-professor wants Linux, so FreeBSD is out of qualifying ... Well, I'm a little bit confused about that what happened, but by intuition, it seems to be a Linux problem. Does anyone ever heard about partition tables created by FreeBSD, caused another system to hang or crash while trying to format, repartition or low-level format the harddrive? Linux isn't able to repartition the harddrive! And the controller on the ASUS CUV4X-D is a VIA chip, not a HighPoint RAID ... Any ideas? If no, please have an amusement with this ... -- MfG O. Hartmann ohartman@klima.physik.uni-mainz.de ---------------------------------------------------------------- IT-Administration des Institut fuer Physik der Atmosphaere (IPA) ---------------------------------------------------------------- Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz Becherweg 21 55099 Mainz Tel: +496131/3924662 (Maschinensaal) Tel: +496131/3924144 FAX: +496131/3923532 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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