From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Jan 29 13:30:09 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) id NAA00195 for hackers-outgoing; Sun, 29 Jan 1995 13:30:09 -0800 Received: from isl.cf.ac.uk (isl-gate.elsy.cf.ac.uk [131.251.22.1]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) with ESMTP id NAA00164; Sun, 29 Jan 1995 13:30:01 -0800 Received: (from paul@localhost) by isl.cf.ac.uk (8.6.9/8.6.9) id OAA00696; Sun, 29 Jan 1995 14:22:49 GMT From: Paul Richards Message-Id: <199501291422.OAA00696@isl.cf.ac.uk> Subject: Re: >1024 cyl IDE drive To: fcawth@squid.umd.edu (Fred Cawthorne) Date: Sun, 29 Jan 1995 14:22:49 +0000 (GMT) Cc: jkh@FreeBSD.org, hoppy@appsmiths.com, hackers@FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: <9501281827.AA01957@squid.umd.edu> from "Fred Cawthorne" at Jan 28, 95 01:27:24 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1374 Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk In reply to Fred Cawthorne who said > > Ummm... Why can't you just rewrite the MBR with fdisk or something?? > I just installed a 1 gig Western Digital drive, and indeed Ontrack Disk > manager does write some stuff into the MBR... The bios has the real > parameters in it, so I would guess if this boot code wasn't there, you > could just use the real ones with the usual >1024 cyl. precautions. > I didn't check if the translator thingie was installed on the drive > right out of the package, but I would guess it wasn't. > If you install a small dos partition, and then try to install FreeBSD, > then I would imagine it would choke when the MBR is overwritten by the > boot selector... ): > There should be a section in the install notes about these drives.. I haven't seen one of these drives yet so I'm not sure what functionality the boot code has. We should, unless the installer requests otherwise, preserve the existing MBR, I think we do I'll have to check. The problem is that without a multi-OS boot manager you won't be able to choose which OS to boot. We need more info on exactly what these things do. -- Paul Richards, FreeBSD core team member. Phone: +44 1222 874000 x6646 (work), +44 1222 457651 (home) Dept. Mechanical Engineering, University of Wales, College Cardiff. Internet: paul@FreeBSD.org, JANET(UK): RICHARDSDP@CARDIFF.AC.UK