Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 19:00:54 -0700 From: Nate Williams <nate@sri.MT.net> To: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.org Subject: Fdisk questions? Message-ID: <199604040200.TAA15535@rocky.sri.MT.net>
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I've had this happen twice to me in the last week, and both machines were laptops so it may have something to do with that, but this problem is driving me crazy. I'm trying to partition a co-worker's machine to run FreeBSD. He has the *exact* same laptop I have, except that he completely wiped his out from scratch and re-installed Win95 on it. Now, I'm tasked to re-install FreeBSD on it. Easy, huh? The problem is that I'm unable to get fdisk under *ANY* OS to 'take'. The original installer created a 300MB DOS partition, and a second 500MB DOS partition that we're going to use for FreeBSD. So, my job is pretty easy. Boot the FreeBSD install floppy, delete the extended partition, create a new FreeBSD partition, and go from there. The problem is that this doesn't work. Once you create the new partition, you should reboot to make it 'take', and once I reboot the original setup is there. Aha, so let's fake it out and do this under DOS. Same deal. I can't even delete the partition. Basically I call fdisk, delete the extended partition, reboot and it re-appears. OS-BS also has a problem installing itself. I can re-run it right after I've installed it and it will appear to have never been installed. Any attempts to write to the partition table and/or the MBR are completely un-successful, and I have no idea. Nothing in the BIOS allows me disable/enable writing the MBR or partition table, so it's not a BIOS thing AFAIK. Also, I can see where fdisk writes to the hard-disk (the disk indicator flashes), so something is being written. I also tried 'pfdisk' to no avail, which gives the same symptoms of OS-BS and the normal DOS/Win95 fdisk programs. Does anyone have a clue on why this isn't working? Is there some magic incantation I must do to get this to work. On my PC, I simply fdisk away with no cause for concern, so I'm not sure why it's such a pain on my co-workers box. The only difference is that on my box I'm still using the original 'NEC' installed hard-disk, while my co-worker's has been wiped and started over clean. Even WAG are appreciated at this stage. Nate
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