From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Jun 5 06:58:10 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id GAA02070 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 5 Jun 1995 06:58:10 -0700 Received: from sass165.sandia.gov (sass165.sandia.gov [132.175.109.1]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id GAA02063 for ; Mon, 5 Jun 1995 06:58:09 -0700 Received: from sargon.mdl.sandia.gov (sargon.mdl.sandia.gov [134.253.20.128]) by sass165.sandia.gov (8.6.11/8.6.12) with ESMTP id IAA03801; Mon, 5 Jun 1995 08:04:35 -0600 Received: (aflundi@localhost) by sargon.mdl.sandia.gov (8.6.10) id HAA21496; Mon, 5 Jun 1995 07:58:06 -0600 Message-Id: <199506051358.HAA21496@sargon.mdl.sandia.gov> From: aflundi@sandia.gov (Alan F Lundin) Date: Mon, 5 Jun 1995 07:58:06 -0600 In-Reply-To: Julian Howard Stacey "Re: FreeBSD 2.0.5-Alpha Installation" (Jun 3, 5:08pm) X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.4 2/2/92) To: Julian Howard Stacey Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.0.5-Alpha Installation Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk On Jun 3, 5:08pm, Julian Howard Stacey wrote: > Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.0.5-Alpha Installation > > > How hard would it be to add a > > probe command to the install program that would take a user > > provided absolute sector number (or a cyl/hd/sec number set), > > read that sector and return a read success or failure status. > > That way a user could discover how big their disk really is, > > then from that fake up some cyl/hd/sec values to get as close > > as possible to that max abs sector value. > > The way I sized my disks (using 386bsd or mach way back when) > was to put on a disklable much bigger than possible, > then do a dd if=raw_device of=/dev/null, then take the count & feed it back > to edit a new entry for /etc/disktab I used to do something like that too, but I don't see how to do that with the new install program (not that I'm unhappy-- I just don't know how to use it yet). --alan