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Date:      Thu, 23 May 2002 12:31:41 -0400
From:      "Jud" <jud@myrealbox.com>
To:        munk@munkboxen.mine.nu
Cc:        questions@FreeBSD.ORG, MH125685@exchange.DAYTONOH.NCR.com
Subject:   Re: Cylinder 1024 Limit vs LBA Disk Drive mapping
Message-ID:  <1022171501.56769ffcjud@myrealbox.com>

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-----Original Message-----
From: Jez Hancock <munk@munkboxen.mine.nu>
To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Date: Thu, 23 May 2002 15:44:57 +0100
Subject: Re: Cylinder 1024 Limit vs LBA Disk Drive mapping

On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 10:37:41AM -0400, Hurley, Michael wrote:
> Greetings,
>=20
> I have a modern system with both IDE drives mapped using LBA, so the BIOS
> has no problem short of about 120GB.
> I will be using either GRUB or V-Communications' "System Commander" as a
> Boot loader.
> Does the < Cylinder 1024 Boot Partition limitation apply?  Since the seco=
nd
> drive is used now for expansion space & swap partitions, I can, if necess=
ary
> rearrange things there and install FreeBSD in the first partition there.
> I'd prefer to install FreeBSD above 12GB  on the first drive.
In my experience helping out in a freebsd based IRC channel, people have
untold problems installing freebsd to anything other than the first
partition on the first drive on the first ide controller!  I did have
quite a few problems when I first tentatively installed freebsd as a
'dual boot' OS with linux on the first partition... as such I removed
linux totally and moved over to freebsd - never looked back:)

My usual advise is to dedicate a whole machine to freebsd if possible -
once you have it up and running you don't want to turn it off anyway :)

In general though, you will have problems installing to a partition that
is past the 1024 cylinder mark though (although you could try it just to
see how much pain it is:).

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

I disagree completely with the above advice.  Installing FreeBSD above 1024=
 cylinders is dead easy.  My installation is on the "second" 40gb of an 8=
0gb RAID0 array.  Before that, it lived on the second 10gb of a 20gb driv=
e, also above the 1024 cylinder mark.

The 1024 cylinder limitation is a BIOS characteristic.  Since you note that=
 your BIOS supports LBA addressing, the 1024 cylinder limit doesn't apply=
.

Just install exactly where you want to.  There aren't any extra installatio=
n steps or fiddling needed to install above 1024 cylinders.  System Comma=
nder, grub, the FreeBSD boot manager or the NT bootloader will happily bo=
ot FreeBSD from there.  Any problems, let us know.

Jud


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