From owner-freebsd-current Wed Jul 5 23:50:41 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from inconnu.isu.edu (inconnu.isu.edu [134.50.8.55]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1C49237B5ED; Wed, 5 Jul 2000 23:50:35 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from galt@inconnu.isu.edu) Received: from localhost (galt@localhost) by inconnu.isu.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id AAA01609; Thu, 6 Jul 2000 00:50:30 -0600 Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 00:50:29 -0600 (MDT) From: John Galt To: Garance A Drosihn Cc: Mike Smith , mjacob@feral.com, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: subtle problem du jour.... In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Is there a quick and dirty way for the label editor to detect if a BIOS is using LBA? This actually sounds like a setup in which the error condition should be alerted on placing / on a cylinder higher than 1024 rather than long after you can do anything about it. The loader error might be a good extra, but the real place the user should be notified of the error condition is upon creation. If the editor can't detect LBA, maybe a generic warning about the wisdom of root partitions above cyl 1024 on non-LBA drives might popup when root partition exists above cyl 1024 (and prepare for lusers who don't know what LBA is flying off the proverbial handle). On Wed, 5 Jul 2000, Garance A Drosihn wrote: > At 3:18 PM -0700 7/5/00, Mike Smith wrote: > >someone else wrote: > > > The only time this showed up as problem was that when I reinstalled > > > the loader (and related forth files), loader silently was not able > > > to read /boot or /modules- the key word here is "silently". > > > > > > There ought to be a warning in loader(8) maybe about this? > > > >There would be a couple of ways to deal with the problem you're > >seeing (in addition to the very worthwhile documentation) - > > > >a) bitch if the loader.rc file can't be found/read. > > > >b) bitch in the BIOS disk driver if an illegal read is attempted. > > > >Both of these might have given you enough clue to help find the > >problem more quickly. Any comments, folks? > > Something along these lines might have saved me a few hours a > week or two ago. I managed to create my partitions so '/' was > the LAST freebsd in the slice I was installing into, instead of > the first partition. This gave me some weird error messages > when trying to start up. In my case the problem was that '/' > started out past the 8-gig mark (even though the rest of the > partitions were all before the 8-gig mark). > > I don't know how much work it would be to generate a specific > enough error message, but in my case I didn't realize I had > put the partition where I had put it. I was getting some kind > of error message, but it wasn't specific enough to help jar > me into looking at the right issue. Eventually one of my > friends asked for some disklabel info, and then we were able > to see where I had mixed things up. > > > --- > Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu > Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu > Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message > -- Pardon me, but you have obviously mistaken me for someone who gives a damn. email galt@inconnu.isu.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message