Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:03:58 +0100 From: "Jonatan Evald Buus" <jonatan.buus@cellpointmobile.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD 7.0 fdisk issue during installation Message-ID: <113ce31b0811211103w22b2108emf6a376a402d7fa60@mail.gmail.com>
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Greetings, I tried to install FreeBSD 7.0 on an old server earlier today and ran in to a number of issues related to slicing and labeling the disk using fdisk. The drive in the machine is a 40GB Seagate Barracude (ST34001A) installed as a Secondary Master on the IDE bus using LBA. The BIOS reports that the drive has 16 sectors pr block, but little else. When accessing fdisk during install, fdisk complains that the disk geometry is invalid and sets it to the default geometry for 40GB: Cylinders: 4865 Heads: 255 Sectors: 63 I've tried with the following configuration based on what was reported by the BIOS: Cylinders: 19150 Heads: 255 Sectors: 16 Looking in the manual: http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/ata/cuda7200pm.pdf, Seagate is specifying the following logical characteristic: Cylinders: 16383 Read / Write heads: 16 Sectors pr track: 63 Which of these settings should be the correct one for the fdisk geometry? Additionally I encountered problems during installation if splitting the disk into more than 4 slices. This would cause the following error to be thrown during prior to the install files being copied (when sysinstall was executing the newfs commands): "Error mounting /mnt/dev/X on /mnt/usr. No such file or directory" Using only 4 slices seems to have solved this error, however I'd like the disk layout to use 5 slices as follows: / = 512MB swap = 2048MB (the machine has 1024MB RAM) /tmp = 512MB /var = 2048MB /usr = whatever remains I noticed that when having 5 slices, the last slice (/usr) would be named X rather than ad2s5 as I'd expect (the drive was detected as ad2). Is this behaviour related to the error in any way? Also, is the above disk layout good for a server intended to run both a web server (Apache) and a database server (PostGreSQL) ? Finally after installation (using only 4 slices) the system will only boot if the FreeBSD boot manager is used. This in turn causes a 4 menu options, all of them named "FreeBSD" to appear during startup despite only the / slice having been set as bootable in fdisk which appears to be indicated by an "A" in the flag column. Selecting the first menu item by pressing F1 will make the system boot as expected. It seems rather silly though to use a boot manager when FreeBSD is the only operating system that is installed (and ever will be installed) on the machine. If the FreeBSD boot manager is not used however and only the MBR is set during installation, the system will fail at startup with error "Invalid Partition Table". Is this because the harddrive is installed as the Secondary Master on the IDE bus? Appreciate any input on this Cheers Jona
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