Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 09:13:41 +0100 (MET) From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: boot disk.... Message-ID: <199511010813.JAA16452@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <199511010113.LAA05097@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Nov 1, 95 11:43:06 am
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As Michael Smith wrote: > > > I hope you won't break the ability to boot right off sector 0, do you? > > That's what an MBR does. If you mean, have a disk without a sector 0 > DOS-style partition table; I would say that booting from it should be a big > no-no. You think too PeeCeeish. :) I finally gave libdisk/sysinstall the ability back to dedicate the entire disk for FreeBSD, from sector 0 through the very last sector of the disk. In case of a SCSI disk, the biggest win is: no stinkin' geometry. A what? A geometry? What's this? ;-) Remember, people who've been demanding this are certainly not the majority of our users, but majorities aren't always a good group of people to look at. Those users who are happy with this are the ``more serious'' ones: people using FreeBSD not only as a toy on their home computers, but people using FreeBSD machines in the industry, with rock-solid hardware (newly bought, thus they don't need to spend a microsecond in bad144, EIDE crap, ``disk managers'' etc.), on disks that will never see something else than a FreeBSD in this life. FreeBSD 2.0.5 often forced this kind of people to install MSDOS first. (``A what? DOS? You tell me i have to install DOS first??'') This was unacceptable, and there's only one figure needed to install on such a disk: the total number of sectors. As long as every BIOS is able to load the very first 15 sectors (i.e., it believes that there are at least 15 sectors on the first track from whatever geometry it implies to the disk), this scenario works. All disks around me are working this way, except for one machine of my current employer -- they've been installing it from a 2.0.5 CD... (before my days there). (To be fair, the disks actually have something like an MBR, but that is imbedded into the BSD disklabel. In case of ``disklabel -B'', this is a faked one, in case of the new sysinstall/libdisk, this one does even contain valid numbers for offset and length of the only FreebSD slice on this disk.) -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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