From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Aug 28 17: 6: 2 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6E31E37B423 for ; Mon, 28 Aug 2000 17:05:57 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from grog@localhost) by wantadilla.lemis.com (8.11.0/8.9.3) id e7T05l011097; Tue, 29 Aug 2000 09:35:47 +0930 (CST) (envelope-from grog) Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 09:35:47 +0930 From: Greg Lehey To: Hugh LaMaster Cc: FreeBSD Questions Subject: Re: Disk partitioning on laptops (was: Making boot floppies (was: BSD Powerpak 4.0)) Message-ID: <20000829093547.C10992@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <20000827110935.D90379@wantadilla.lemis.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i In-Reply-To: ; from lamaster@nren.nasa.gov on Mon, Aug 28, 2000 at 09:47:52AM -0700 Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Monday, 28 August 2000 at 9:47:52 -0700, Hugh LaMaster wrote: > > On Sun, 27 Aug 2000, Greg Lehey wrote: > >> Ah, this is the first time you mentioned it's a laptop. We had some >> problems a while back with some broken BIOSes which caused a valid >> bootable CD to fail to boot. Yes, that's unfortunate. > >>> The laptop is a Toshiba with 160MB ram, 6.2 gig IBM drive, >>> 3Com-Noteworthy card (is not a Wincard). >> >> But it is a modem, right? We'll look at that later if necessary. > > Just an aside: for some reason, I haven't been able to use the > bootfloppy sysinstall partition label program to label (let alone newfs) > a Dell Inspiron 3500 laptop that I have. It has a 6 GB drive; > the first 3 GB is a FAT32 partition. I have tried repeatedly > to label/newfs the next partition, which is most of the next 3 GB, > with a FreeBSD partition, to no avail. I assume that it is a BIOS > problem. I've never had this problem before, but then, I never > tried to use FreeBSD on a laptop before. Is there a known problem > with the Inspiron 3500? I userstand that I will also have a problem > with the PCMCIA card controller/cards/IRQ's later; I just wish that > I could get to that point and experience those problems. I haven't heard of this before. I have an Inspiron 7500 myself, and I had no trouble installing FreeBSD on it, though there are some strangenesses: FreeBSD currently doesn't support the sound hardware, though beta versions are available, and the BIOS expects Microsoft partitions to the point where it can no longer find the save-to-disk partition. I don't know what to do about this one. Also, if you use a FreeBSD boot manager, the builtin "virus protection" claims that the boot sector is "infected" with the "bloodhound virus" and tries to "fix" it for you. Don't let it: you'll trash the boot manager. In your case, it would be nice to know exactly what you did and what happened. Greg -- When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message