Date: Mon, 22 Jan 1996 12:01:08 +1030 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: jiefg@generation.net (J.F. Gratton) Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Troubles Installing the OS... Message-ID: <199601220131.MAA16952@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <199601211617.LAA23898@sunserver.generation.net> from "J.F. Gratton" at Jan 21, 96 11:17:07 am
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J.F. Gratton stands accused of saying:
> Nowhere in your doc is a place that suggests that you have to install
> FreeBSD in a PRIMARY partition, so I assumed that I could install it in an
> unformatted logical one, but somehow it fails. Actually, in the INSTALL.TXT
> file, there's a section concerning the utility FIPS that suggested that you
> could install both from a PRIMARY or LOGICAL (... or so I assumed).
Um. FreeBSD needs to be installed in a partition which has an entry in
the master partition table. In DOS parlance I guess that makes it a
'primary' partition. You can only have 4 of these on a drive, and if
you want to use 'logical drives', one of these 4 is the 'extended partition'
that holds the 'logical drives'.
> Partition scheme:
>
> Master HD (Western Digital 425MB) 425MB formatted gives 405MB
> Primary, 150MB
> Extended logical, 255MB
>
> Partitions lettered C: to F:
Ok, so you have a primary partition, and an extended partition with three
'logical drives' in it, correct?
>
> Slave HD (Maxtor 850MB) 850MB gives 812-813MB formatted
> Primary for OS/2 Boot Manager (2MB)
> Extended Logical for the remainder
>
> Partitions lettered G: to J:
Ok, so a small primary partition, and an extended with four 'logical
drives'.
> I want to install FreeBSD at the end of my second HD (the Maxtor 850MB).
> There's a 190MB unused just for it at the end of the drive.
You won't be able to do that, as that's beyond the 500M mark, and thus
is unreachable to your BIOS.
> The problem I see is that, althought this 190MB is labelled "Unused" or
> "FreeSpace" by OS/2's FDisk (which I prefer over MSDOS' one), this
> unformatted partition is part of the Extended partiotion created a long time
> ago. Could this be a reason FreeBSD's FDisk reports no unused space (besides
> the 2 areas described above) ? Do I have to re-partition the whole drive so
Yes. The space isn't "free", it's used by the extended partition.
> The thing I really want to avoid is having to create a 190MB PRIMARY
> partition for FreeBSD. The reason I want to install all non-DOS partitions
> at the end of my drive is to avoid "letter conflicts". Creating a Primary
This isn't an issue, as 'letter conflicts' only occur with FAT filesystems.
You will have to backup the second drive, remove everything on in, install
FreeBSD, then recreate your extended partition and restore into it.
The FreeBSD root filesystem must be entirely below the 1024-cylinder
(untranslated) mark for the bootloader to be able to read it.
> Oh ! Last question.... I'm supposed to buy a new Hard Disk this week, a
> Fujitsu 1GB HD. Will FreeBSD be able to recognize a 3 HDs system ? Thanks
If it's on a second IDE controller, sure.
> Jean-Fran=E7ois Gratton ("Jeff")
--
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[
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