Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 20:35:11 -0700 (PDT) From: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> To: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@monkeys.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Some serious gripes about `fdisk' and also `booteasy'. Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9910162031250.6729-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> In-Reply-To: <7377.940121847@monkeys.com>
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On Sat, 16 Oct 1999, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote: > > This had bitten me twice now. > > Will whoever is supporting/maintaining the `fdisk' program *PLEASE* fix it > so that it displays some sort of a warning when the user is just about to > partition a SCSI drive for which the on/off status of BIOS address trans- > lation (for disks larger than 1GB) _cannot_ be automatically and properly > determined by fdisk itself? One piece of advice often given is to put a dos partition on the disk (it can be deleted during install if wish) to assist with determining the correct geometry. I've installed FreeBSD on probably a close to a dozen scsi hard drives and never had this problem. I didn't think bios address translation was relevant for scsi drives, in any case. Try the dos partition. Annelise > > You have no idea how annoying and aggravating it is to spend half a day > installing a whole new fresh FreeBSD only to find out (after you are > all done) that the damn thing won't even boot because fdisk defaulted to > assuming a disk geometry that is just plain wrong/dysfunctional. > > And of course, to add insult to injury, it ain't even all that obvious > what the hell is actually wrong when this sort of mistake gets made. The > `booteasy' boot manager just sits there, stupidly, prompting you to hit > `F1' while it endlessly just beeps at you. That's it. Just endless > beeping. No error message, no nuttin'. At first, I thought that I had > a bad keyboard or something, and thus, I tried swapping it for another > one! (But of course, that made no difference.) This is not my idea of > ``user friendly''. > > If `booteasy' is unable to boot from a given drive or from a given partition, > couldn't it at least say something like `Error 473 - Return to continue'? > I mean I _do_ understand that memory space in the boot routine is very > minimal, but at least there should be room for something small like that! > Then, in addition, _someplace_ (e.g. in man pages and/or on the FreeBSD.Org > website) there could be a description of `Error 473' that says something > like ``This error (473) means that you probably bozoed the geometry on your > SCSI drive when you partitioned it. Back up and try again.'' That would > be at least a little bit more friendly that the current behavior (of booteasy) > which is just to sit there and beep at you as if you've got a broken keyboard > or something. > > Sorry if this letter sounds too negative. I'm _am_ a big fan of the OS, > but as noted above, it is REALLY annoying to learn that you've wasted half > a day because of errors and warnings that you DIDN'T get. > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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