Date: Tue, 08 Jul 1997 13:20:47 +0200 From: Kent Boortz <kent@erlang.ericsson.se> To: steveh@cetus.digicon-brs.com.au Cc: kent@erlang.ericsson.se Subject: Re: Vanishing FreeBSD Partitions Message-ID: <199707081120.NAA01323@townsend.ericsson.se> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 8 Jul 1997 18:45:08 %2B1100 (AEST)" References: <Pine.HPP.3.91.970708183314.24131C-100000@cetus.digicon-brs.com.au>
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Do you write to your DOS partition from FreeBSD? This is probably not relevant to your setup but I managed to do a very stupid thing.... I had a disk crash (my fault) so I removed the old partitions and repartitioned the drive. Discovered that Windows95 was still there. Great. I ran 'defrag' and 'scandisk' to verify that the Win95 partition was ok. I was lazy and thought "Why not keep it". I will never do that again. I installed FreeBSD on a partition (slice) above the Win95 partition. I knew the new partitions wasn't exactly as big as the old ones. The Win95 partition happened to be a little smaller than before. This moved the FreeBSD partition down on the disk. Problem was that I assumed that the information a OS uses about a partition was taken from a central block on the disk, not locally in the partition itself. So Windows95 thought it was having a larger partition than I gave it. In effect I had two overlapping partitions! I didn't find out about that until I installed some more games on the Windows95 partition and filled that partition up. It wiped out the first part of the FreeBSD partition. The "/etc" directory was completely gone 8-( I'm still not sure what I should have done to remove the Win95 partition completely. Removing the partition in fdisk didn't help. I suspect that a format would have used the information inside the partition as well. And after getting into this disaster I had trouble fixing this problem because fdisk got confused when the partition map and the information inside the partition didn't match and refused to take away the partition. I don't even remember how I finally solved it after hours of "trail and error". /kgb
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