From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Aug 9 13:28:41 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from nisser.com (n2000039.telekabel.chello.nl [212.187.0.39]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 08E5914C2F for ; Mon, 9 Aug 1999 13:28:26 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from roelof@nisser.com) Received: from nisser.com (roelof [10.0.0.2]) by nisser.com (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id WAA62071; Mon, 9 Aug 1999 22:10:07 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from roelof@nisser.com) Message-ID: <37AF3534.2E92A559@nisser.com> Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1999 22:08:20 +0200 From: Roelof Osinga Organization: eboa - engineering buro Office Automation X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.6 [en] (WinNT; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Brian Candler Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Booting from large IDE drive, not first partition References: <19990809181618.A11386@linnet.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Brian Candler wrote: > > Sorry if this is a FAQ, but I've searched the archives and can't find > anything recent regarding large IDE hard drives. Hm. I'm pretty sure I've answered this before . > I have installed 3.2-19990809-STABLE on a workstation with a 13GB hard > drive, which is sliced like this: > > s1 2GB Windows95 FAT16 > s2 6GB Extended (2GB FAT16, rest in reserve) > s3 5GB FreeBSD > > Unfortunately, I am unable to make it boot. The FreeBSD bootloader is in the > MBR[1], and at boot time it asks me > ... > The machine is a Gateway box (GP7-450 is what the label says) and the BIOS > setup says that the disk is in LBA mode. You'll have to make sure that all cylinders of the boot partition are below the 1024 boundary. That is a BIOS enforced boundary. This usually means switching to LBA from the default CHS addressing scheme. Since you already are in LBA mode... > (2) boot a kernel from floppy disk and have it continue to load with wd0a as > its root filesystem (not ideal but it would be acceptable) I thought that was a function of the install diskettes? Must admit I haven't had need to, though. > (OK, I admit it, I am a Linux user. However I am trying to avoid installing > LILO or just giving up :-) Finally it all comes out . Don't worry, so was I. A huge difference, in this, between Linux and FreeBSD is that the latter uses its own partitioning scheme inside a huge regular partition. This makes it harder to stay within the 1024 boundary. My system with a 10+ GB disk looks like this: nisser:~# fdisk ******* Working on device /dev/rwd0 ******* parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are: cylinders=1247 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl) Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1 parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are: cylinders=1247 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl) Media sector size is 512 Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1 Information from DOS bootblock is: The data for partition 1 is: sysid 165,(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD) start 63, size 20032992 (9781 Meg), flag 80 (active) beg: cyl 0/ sector 1/ head 1; end: cyl 1023/ sector 63/ head 254 The data for partition 2 is: The data for partition 3 is: The data for partition 4 is: meaning I got some 200 cylinders unused. But it boots! Inside it looks like: nisser:~# df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/wd0s1a 297663 20695 253155 8% / /dev/wd0s1d 3455406 838004 2340970 26% /home /dev/wd0s1e 297663 22 273828 0% /tmp /dev/wd0s1g 2977230 834468 1904584 30% /usr /dev/wd0s1h 1984479 75127 1750594 4% /usr/local /dev/wd0s1f 297663 16783 257067 6% /var procfs 4 4 0 100% /proc Anyway, start looking at the cylinders. Hope this helps. Roelof -- Home is where the (@) http://eboa.com/ is. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message