Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 22:05:17 -0700 From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@monkeys.com> To: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Some serious gripes about `fdisk' and also `booteasy'. Message-ID: <3113.940136717@monkeys.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of Sat, 16 Oct 1999 20:35:11 -0700. <Pine.BSF.4.10.9910162031250.6729-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu>
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In message <Pine.BSF.4.10.9910162031250.6729-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu>, you w rote: > > >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. Its too late now! Yes, if I had known about this trick _before_ got myself into trouble, it would have been helpful. But I didn't, so it wasn't. But anyway, I shouldn't have to stoop to actually handling floppies that contain... dare I say it... (yecch, gag) software from REDMOND WASHINGTON! (I always worry when _I_ have to come into physical contact with such things, let alone bringing them into contact with my hard drives. I mean hey, I don't want to get CONTAMINATED! Remember what happend to those people in that Tokyo subway? This MS stuff is all really icky phoo as far as I'm concerned. I'm not kidding. I don't like touching that stuff. It's like a disease. It sticks to you, and its tuff to get off, even with a big green bar of LAVA.) More to the point of course, I don't want to waste disk space for an MS-DOG partition that I am *never* going to use. Even more to the point: This is (apparently) a known ``gotcha'', i.e. the fact that the FreeBSD `fdisk' will guess wrong about the geometry of SCSI drives and then blithely let you go thru a whole install process with NO HOPE of ever being able to boot what you are installing. This is exactly the kind of place where it would be just polite to put up the software equivalent of a big red flashing sign saying ``CAUTION! LAND MINE AHEAD! WATCH WHERE YOU STEP!'' To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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