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Date:      Tue, 12 Jun 2001 09:52:01 +1200 (NZST)
From:      Juha Saarinen <juha@saarinen.org>
To:        "Karsten W. Rohrbach" <karsten@rohrbach.de>
Cc:        'Richard Smith' <rdls@rdls.net>, "'Freebsd-Stable@Freebsd. Org'" <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Disk geometry oddity
Message-ID:  <Pine.LNX.4.33.0106120947310.5609-100000@vimfuego.saarinen.org>
In-Reply-To: <20010611181930.F17891@mail.webmonster.de>

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On Mon, 11 Jun 2001, Karsten W. Rohrbach wrote:

> this depends solely on the fact if there is data on the disk (other
> partitions) you want to keep.

;-) There is, and I was planning on keeping it.

> 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").

Yeah, I know... it's the result of an unholy cabal involving Intel,
Microsoft, IBM and that very evil concept called "backward compatibility".
These boxes are FreeBSD-only though, which is why they were once set to
"dangerously dedicated" (donning flame suit as there's sure to be someone
who'll have a go at this statement...)


> 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.

OK, thanks, that's worth bearing in mind. I think it's mentioned in the
FAQ as well.

-- 
Regards,


Juha

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