From owner-freebsd-stable Mon Jun 11 9:19:26 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mail.webmonster.de (datasink.webmonster.de [194.162.162.209]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 737EA37B407 for ; Mon, 11 Jun 2001 09:19:09 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from karsten@rohrbach.de) Received: (qmail 24451 invoked by uid 1000); 11 Jun 2001 16:19:30 -0000 Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 18:19:30 +0200 From: "Karsten W. Rohrbach" To: Juha Saarinen Cc: 'Richard Smith' , "'Freebsd-Stable@Freebsd. Org'" Subject: Re: Disk geometry oddity Message-ID: <20010611181930.F17891@mail.webmonster.de> References: <20010610230647.A665@gaia.home.rdls.net> <006501c0f1fb$c8d23ac0$0a01a8c0@den2> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-md5; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="27ZtN5FSuKKSZcBU" Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <006501c0f1fb$c8d23ac0$0a01a8c0@den2>; from juha@saarinen.org on Mon, Jun 11, 2001 at 10:22:07AM +1200 X-Arbitrary-Number-Of-The-Day: 42 X-URL: http://www.webmonster.de/ X-Disclaimer: My opinions do not necessarily represent those of my employer Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG --27ZtN5FSuKKSZcBU Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Juha Saarinen(juha@saarinen.org)@2001.06.11 10:22:07 +0000: > :: By allowing sysinstall to use a "more likely" geometry, it=20 > :: fixed the problem, > :: see also FAQ 1.17. >=20 > Silly question, perhaps, but if you change to the "more likely" geometry > with the G key, would you lose data? this depends solely on the fact if there is data on the disk (other partitions) you want to keep. >=20 > :: In case you weren't aware, "dangerously dedicated mode" is=20 > :: still available,=20 > :: albeit not recommended, using the (purposely) undocumented 'F' key. >=20 > No, I gather so, but it's an existing installation with two "dangerously > dedicated" disks. all the fuzz about geometry of your disks is only important when booting. when your bios does not grok the layout, you're hosed (box won't boot). when the kernel is loaded and starts up, the scsi devices are accessed natively with linear adresses. if you multiboot (dos/win/...) you should leave the geometry as it is, because you would step on the feet of microshaft's bootloader which is - ehrm, no pun intended - still way 80ish, even on win2000, and fucks up without any useable error messages (very "generic" ones, like "my car does not run"). as a rule of thumb, you should create your "a" partition at the beginning of the disk. the "a" partition holds the root filesystem, thus it contains /boot with the loader and custom config. if you are going to use from big disks with multiboot, create an msdog partition small enough to create a bootable slice for *bsd which can be reached by bios addressing. without the well-known "adaptec mapping" with n cylinders, 255 heads and 63 sectors/track you would not be able to boot partitions behind the 1GB limit. o/~ it's an evil world we're living in... o/~ /k --=20 > UNiX *IS* user friendly. It's just selective about who it's friends are. KR433/KR11-RIPE -- WebMonster Community Founder -- nGENn GmbH Senior Techie http://www.webmonster.de/ -- ftp://ftp.webmonster.de/ -- http://www.ngenn.n= et/ karsten&rohrbach.de -- alpha&ngenn.net -- alpha&scene.org -- catch@spam.de GnuPG 0x2964BF46 2001-03-15 42F9 9FFF 50D4 2F38 DBEE DF22 3340 4F4E 2964 B= F46 --27ZtN5FSuKKSZcBU Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (FreeBSD) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE7JO+SM0BPTilkv0YRAmXlAKC7+TRPZysc0wbcguE0VE6sFhyXHACdFb8N 2+ejz2dTRcV4gh91M2k2hbA= =geR7 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --27ZtN5FSuKKSZcBU-- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message