From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Sep 5 07:01:26 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id HAA18900 for questions-outgoing; Thu, 5 Sep 1996 07:01:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ime.net (ime.net [204.97.248.4]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id HAA18893 for ; Thu, 5 Sep 1996 07:01:20 -0700 (PDT) Received: from kimiko.tcguy.net (buxton-10.ime.net [206.231.148.139]) by ime.net (8.7.4/8.6.12) with SMTP id KAA02306; Thu, 5 Sep 1996 10:00:23 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <322EDCF9.2345@ime.net> Date: Thu, 05 Sep 1996 10:00:25 -0400 From: Gary Chrysler Reply-To: tcg@ime.net Organization: The Computer Guy X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0b6 (Win95; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: shadows@kuwait.net CC: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: 2.1.5-RELEASE installation question References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-questions@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk The ShadowS Know wrote: > > On Wed, 4 Sep 1996, Gary Chrysler wrote: > > > Paul T. Root wrote: > > > > For EIDE drives, the root partition *MUST* be completely contained within > > > the first 504Meg of the drive, due to the PC architectures BIOS limitations. > > > > > > > That applies to all IDE bootable devices, Not just EIDE. > > Well I installed 2.1.5 on an EIDE and even though it does start in the > first 504 megs its not *completely* contained in it. Is this causing some > problem I'm not aware of? I've only experienced it bieng slow, and I > figured its like that since there is no EIDE driver (or so the kernel > LINT config file said). > The importance is that the bootable partition be fully inside the first 1024 cylinders (~504M), The rest dosn't matter. In FreeBSD's case this is the / slice! (root slice) The Limit: Is in the Systems BIOS INT 13 functions 16 bit registers. DX - 8 bits for head number. 8 bits for drive number. CX - 10 bits for cylinder number. 6 bits for sector number. The largest 10 bit number possible is 1023, Thus the limit on numbers of cylinders is 1024. (0-1023) What fries me is, DX allows 255 drives. -Enjoy Gary ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Improve America's Knowledge... Share yours The Borg... Where minds meet (207) 929-3848