Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:58:42 -0700 From: Doug Barton <dougb@FreeBSD.org> To: Bruce Cran <bruce@cran.org.uk> Cc: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Difference of opinion about my disk geometry Message-ID: <4C77EEC2.80909@FreeBSD.org> In-Reply-To: <20100827070233.000075a8@unknown> References: <4C7715D0.10604@FreeBSD.org> <20100827070233.000075a8@unknown>
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On 08/26/2010 11:02 PM, Bruce Cran wrote: > CHS is totally obsolete, and can be ignored for anything but really old > computers I think - LBA has been used since about 2000. If you use the > modern partitioning tool in Windows, diskpart.exe, you don't get told > about the geometry at all; if you use gpart in FreeBSD you get told > about the fwheads and fwsectors but partitions are specified in terms > of an offset. Thanks to you and to Partha for the replies. I'd like to make it clear I am not arguing with either of you, I don't even know enough about disks to BE dangerous. :) I am simply trying to understand what's going on (and make sure I'm not doing something now that's going to cause my data to go away tomorrow). In Linux fdisk I get errors that the partitions don't end on cylinder boundaries. In FreeBSD sysinstall when I re-installed my 9-current partition last night I got the following error after finishing the fdisk step, "chunk ad0s2 does not start on a track boundary" (ad0s2 is the extended partition I created in windows). So neither OS seems to like the current situation, but if you're telling me that those errors are harmless I have no problems ignoring them. What I definitely think is true at this point is that my 25-year-old "knowledge" about this stuff is now worse than useless. :) So I need to learn how to to do it better. I took a look at the man page for gpart and it's way over my head. I was not impressed with the way that the disk slicer for the ubuntu installer worked. Biggest single objection was that it considers 1 gigabyte to be 1,000,000 bytes, but at least it said this somewhere obvious so I could do the math to make it "right" myself, and fwiw Nautilus and the gnome "Disk Utility" seem to have the same view of the world, even though 'df -h' shows the "real" Gbs. However the results seemed Ok. I did some digging on line and saw many references to gparted, which is included in the ubuntu live cd, and seemed quite easy to work with. So my current line of thinking is that when I get ready to redo this disk for the last time (which should be soon now that I have my grub situation sorted) that I'll boot the ubuntu live cd and slice the whole disk first with gparted, then install windows, the 2 FreeBSDs (and specify the 30401/255/63 geometry to sysinstall just in case), then Linux last so that it can install grub and I'll finally be done! If anyone sees a problem with that process I'd appreciate it if you let me know asap because at this point even I am tired of fiddling with this stuff. :) Doug -- Improve the effectiveness of your Internet presence with a domain name makeover! http://SupersetSolutions.com/ Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
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