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Date:      Mon, 25 Nov 1996 21:41:40 +0100 (MET)
From:      J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de>
To:        chat@freebsd.org
Cc:        julian@whistle.com (Julian Elischer)
Subject:   Re: 2.2-ALPHA install failure
Message-ID:  <199611252041.VAA05675@uriah.heep.sax.de>
In-Reply-To: <3299E533.15FB7483@whistle.com> from Julian Elischer at "Nov 25, 96 10:28:03 am"

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(NB: moved to -chat, it's no longer technical contents. ;)

As Julian Elischer wrote:

> personally I NEVER EVER EVER use dedicated mode.
> I find it too useful to have the 'dead area' before the 
> first partition, and hell it's only 32K usually!

Well, and now that's the difference: i found it plain useless to waste
these sectors for just nothing. :)  (Nor would i ever have a need for
`nextboot' or such, my systems can always boot off the primary disk.)

It still bugs me that newfs (or better: UFS) is often wasting so many
sectors at the end of a partition since it also still believes that
disks have something like a uniform geometry that can be expressed in
terms of cylinders, heads, and sectors...

Btw., Julian, that's just the paradigm difference: things like
nextboot, or the 32 KB gap after the MBR are certainly useful for
playing games if it comes to more than just Unix on one machine.
``Dangerously dedicated'' mode is only for those who really never even
think of something else than Unix; they don't have a need for a bloody
DOS partition on the disk, nor for any geometry hassles (well, there
are still enough of them caused by the BIOS braindamage), nor...  It's
just the same way Unix has always been.

Both paradigms have a substantial need in our userbase, but both user
groups are largely disjunctive.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)



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