Date: Mon, 08 Jun 1998 13:11:09 -0700 From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@monkeys.com> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Did I screw up? Installing FreeBSD and cylinder boundaries. Message-ID: <9253.897336669@monkeys.com>
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Yesterday, I tried to do a fresh install of FreeBSD 2.2.6 from the CD ROM set that I recently purchased from Walnut Creek. I was both rushed and subtantially sleep-deprived while I was doing this, so naturally I managed to screw it up rather completely. (Yea yea, I know. Never install a new OS when you are in a state of sleep-depravation. That is rule number one, and I know I broke it.) Anyway, I was rushed, because the system in question... i.e. the one where I was doing the install... it (and must be) located over at a friend's house and it need to be on his local network. (The friend in question lives about three hours away from me by car, and so going over to his place to work on this system is not something that I do frequently.) Anyway, about hafway through my install, my friend started to get ansy, because he had to leave and do some other stuff. So he basically kicked me out and said that he would finish up the install for me. (He is also quite UNIX-fluent... at least as much as me, and probably moreso.) Today I called him and he told me that my install was totally screwed up and that it would *never* have worked right and that now he would have to start the whole things over for me from scratch. Naturally, I feel bad to have ended up putting him to so much trouble on my account. My friend said that my install was basically broken from the get-go because I failed to have the one and only non-swap partition that I had requested to have made be aligned to the exact start of a cylinder boundary. He said that this was a requirement in cases where I was planning to boot from the one and only hard drive on the system... i.e. the one I was installing FreeBSD onto and that the only way that you can get away with having the FreeBSD root partition _not_ be so aligned was if you would be normally booting from some other device. Is my friend correct about all of this? Must the root partition for FreeBSD be aligned to a cylinder boundary? If so, why didn't _something_ yell at me during the automated install process and tell me that I was screwing up when I failed to properly align that partition to such a boundary? (My friend says that the install processes ``Assumed that you knew what the hell you were doing.'' My response? ``Well, obviously that was a poor assumption on its part.'') This all happened yesterday. Today, I am still rather sleep-deprived, and now, on top of that I get to also feel both guilty and stupid. Swell. Did I really deserve all this? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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