Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 09:53:24 +1000 From: Stanley.Hopcroft@ipaustralia.gov.au To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Large disk laptop problems: Gateway Solo 9100 XL Message-ID: <4A256720.00839E92.00@noteshub01.aipo.gov.au>
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Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, I am writing to ask for help partitioning the disk of my employers Gateway Solo 9100 XL Laptop for MS-Windows 9x and FreeBSD 2.2.8-RELEASE-PAO. The system is exhibiting all the symptoms of bad disk geometry (eg After pressing F2 at the booeasy promp to boot FreeBSD the prompt reappears). MS Windows occupies the first 3.5GB slice/MS DOS partition, the rest 4+GB is FreeBSD. The disk, an IBM-DYLA-28100 is reported by the BIOS as 15880 cyl/16 heads/ 63 sectors. My colleague used FIPS to partition the disk and we attempted to install FreeBSD - something we have many positive experiences doing - to no avail. The disk geometry reported by FDISK (in the partition disk part of sysinstall) was not the same as the BIOS; changing it (from x cyls/163 heads/63 to that above) suppresses the complaint about a partition not starting on a track boundary & allos the FreeBSD install to continue but the PC will not boot anything. Does the root partition of the FreeBSD slice need to be in the first 1024 cylinders ?. The BIOS says it supports LBA. I have tried a number of times with the same result of losing the formerly bootable MS partition/slice as well as not being able to boot the freshly installed FreeBSD slice. This is a fairly devasting return for me to the bad old days of OS/2 1.3 and Win 3.x. It's not possible for me to back up the MS partition - as it must be for *many* if not all home users - and so it seems that installing FreeBSD equates to reloading MS. Your comments will be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Yours sincerely. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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