From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Mar 2 17:24:16 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from freebie.lemis.com (freebie.lemis.com [192.109.197.137]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9813037BC82 for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 17:24:09 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from grog@freebie.lemis.com) Received: (from grog@localhost) by freebie.lemis.com (8.9.3/8.9.0) id LAA13495; Fri, 3 Mar 2000 11:53:36 +1030 (CST) Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2000 11:53:36 +1030 From: Greg Lehey To: Kevin Leung Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Q: is there any problems in having the FreeBSD root partition above the 1024 cylinder mark? Message-ID: <20000303115336.M12352@freebie.lemis.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0pre2i In-Reply-To: WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-41-739-7062 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tuesday, 29 February 2000 at 17:33:26 -0800, Kevin Leung wrote: > I will be getting a 20GB IDE drive as the second hard drive for > my computer. I want to have a triple boot system or more. First > hard drive was dedicated to Win98. For this > second drive, I plan to have a FAT32, FreeBSD, and BeOS slices. > What is the constraints on how I place FreeBSD? Does the > current boot manager allow FreeBSD slices to sit above the 1024 > cylinder mark. > > Can a FreeBSD slice start below the 1024 cylinder mark and the > root partition to be under the mark, but the slice to end above > the 1024 cylinder mark? FreeBSD has always supported the root file system anywhere on the disk. The issue is how you get FreeBSD started: you need the BIOS to load the kernel. Many older BIOSes were restricted to the 1023 cylinder limit you mention. It always works as long as the root file system is entirely below the 1023 cylinder mark, regardless of how large the FreeBSD slice is. But it's possible it's not a problem at all: as far as I know, this restriction doesn't apply to any BIOSes made in the last year or two. There's only one way to find out for sure: try it. If it doesn't work, it at least shouldn't break anything, though you should always make a backup before installing a new system if there's anything of value you want to leave on the disk. > I might have my slice and partition definition switched. I am > using slice to represent the thing that holds multiple > partitions (/, /tmp, /var, /usr). Yes, that's the correct way round. A slice is a Microsoft "partition". Greg -- When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message