From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Aug 6 18:26:28 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id SAA20818 for questions-outgoing; Tue, 6 Aug 1996 18:26:28 -0700 (PDT) Received: from hfdmail1.imagine.com (hfdmail1.imagine.com [204.249.166.6]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id SAA20797 for ; Tue, 6 Aug 1996 18:25:46 -0700 (PDT) Received: from bluehub1.imagine.com (204.249.166.37) by hfdmail1.imagine.com with ESMTP (Apple Internet Mail Server 1.1.1); Tue, 6 Aug 1996 21:37:05 -0400 From: "Jeffrey M. Metcalf" To: "FreeBSD questions" Cc: "Jeff at work" Subject: Installation probs and fdisk/pfdisk Date: Tue, 6 Aug 1996 21:22:16 -0400 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Priority: 3 X-Mailer: Microsoft Internet Mail 4.70.1132 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <1372755071-85075705@hfdmail1.imagine.com> Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Hello, I was recently helping a friend of mine install FreeBSD on his system and we ran into a problem partitioning with fdisk. We partitioned the hard drive too small at first and decided that we wanted a bigger partition. Unfortunately, fdisk would no longer recognize the full capacity of the hard drive for partitioning and so we weren't able to restore the minimum size of the first partition to its original size. We were brain damaged and forgot to make a backup of the partition table before we hit it with fdisk. We have an EIDE hard drive and are hoping that we can use the DOS utility pfdisk from the Walnut Creek CDROM or the FreeBSD fdisk (preferably pfdisk) to force the partition table back into shape. We don't know the native geometry of the hard drive, since the geometry that the BIOS reports and the geometry that FreeBSD's bootstrap reports can sometimes be confusingly different. To get to the point, which geometry should we feed to pfdisk or FreeBSD's fdisk to fix things up? The geometry that would report 64 cylinders or the one that reports 16 cylinders? Do you know a way that we could be certain about the right value of the geometry once we determine which type is the correct one to to feed pfdisk/fdisk? Thanks, Jeffrey M. Metcalf 200 Ridgefield Drive Middletown, CT 06457 metcalf@imagine.com Jeffrey_M._Metcalf@ccmail.bms.com