From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Oct 16 17:55: 4 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from monkeys.com (i180.value.net [206.14.136.180]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AE59214CE7 for ; Sat, 16 Oct 1999 17:54:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from rfg@monkeys.com) Received: from monkeys.com (LOCALHOST [127.0.0.1]) by monkeys.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id RAA07379 for ; Sat, 16 Oct 1999 17:57:27 -0700 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Some serious gripes about `fdisk' and also `booteasy'. From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 17:57:27 -0700 Message-ID: <7377.940121847@monkeys.com> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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? 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