Date: Sun, 13 Jul 1997 13:11:19 -0500 (CDT) From: Nick Johnson <spatula@gulf.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: A few solutions Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.96.970713130431.16120A-100000@pompano.pcola.gulf.net>
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My apologies if some of this is already in the handbook... I wanted to share an experience I had to save others a lot of time and frustration. If you're wanting to use a disk that has, say 4096 cylindars in normal mode, and you want to dual boot, you'll probably run into trouble. In LBA mode, you can often get the cylindars to be 1023, but FreeBSD's fdisk will still detect the hard disk's native geometry. For this reason, if you're dual-booting and want things to actually work, you will need to set the drive geometry to what your BIOS is using (in LBA mode) in the FreeBSD fdisk. If you don't do this, things will get fairly confused and you won't be able to boot FreeBSD from the boot manager (but you probably will be able to boot using a boot floppy and specifying the location of the kernel) Also another pointer: when buying RAM, spend the extra money and get parity RAM. You may need to specify "True Parity". There are goofy parity RAM simms that have one extra chip that emulates parity (essentially always setting correct parity) for boards that require parity ram... don't buy these- they don't offer anything more than ordinary non-parity simms. I was having a severe problem with page faults at inopportune times (ie, in kernel mode) and signal 11s all over the place, which has now totally gone away since I replaced the non-parity ram (which obviously has a few bad bits somewhere) with parity ram. Nick -- "Oh yeah? Well, you're ugly." - Me, to Steve Boursy of news.admin.censorship Nick Johnson, version 1.0 http://www.pcola.gulf.net/~spatula/
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