Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2001 21:00:35 +0200 (EET) From: Adrian Penisoara <ady@warpnet.ro> To: Karl-Petter =?iso-8859-1?Q?=C5kesson?= <kalle@sics.se> Cc: "freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG" <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Installing FreeBSD on a 20Gb disc on a laptop with old BIOS Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10112222053490.23124-100000@ady.warpnet.ro> In-Reply-To: <3C204E2F.982FEE60@sics.se>
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Hi,
I'm not sure wether I've had this problem, but to me it seems that the
right solution is:
* let the IBM DM make that FAT partition, because that's what helps
fdisk recognize the correct disk geometry (see the docs)
* in the sysinstall delete that FAT partition and make one small slice
(no more than 500Mb) which will hold the root filesystem (otherwise
the bootloader won't be able to load the kernel) and make the rest a
separate slice
* in disklabel make the / fs in the first slice (ad0s1a) and the rest of
the filesystems in the second slice (ad0s2). The swap can be in either
of them two.
My $0.02
Ady (@warpnet.ro)
_______________________________________________________________________
| Programming in BASIC causes brain damage. |
| (Edsger Wybe Dijkstra) |
On Wed, 19 Dec 2001, Karl-Petter [iso-8859-1] Åkesson wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have an old IBM thinkpad 560 that I want to runt FreeBSD on. The
> original drive is only 2Gb so I upgraded to a 20Gb. Now it turned out
> that the BIOS was to old to support this and the laptop locked-up during
> the initialization phase before booting. DDO(Dynamic Drive Overlay) from
> OnTrack solved this since it tricks the BIOS to believe it has a much
> smaller drive.
>
> But.... It seems to trick FDISK in the FreeBSD installation as well.
> I have tried a lot of different ways to come around this but somehow I
> always end up with a non-working system :-(
>
> If I just install DDO on the drive and then start the FREEBSD
> installation FDISK thinks the drive starts at sector -63 and gets very
> confused. I solved this by letting the IBM Disk Manager, the software
> that I use to install DDO, to create a FAT partition in the beginning of
> the drive, only 100 MB.
> Now I can use the rest of the disk in FDISK to make it a FREEBSD
> partition, but it wont boot. Changing the first 100MB partition to
> FreeBSD type, does not help, the label editor cant use it, says "Unable
> to create partition. Too big?".
>
> Anyone that have succesfully managed to install FreeBSD on a large drive
> that isnt supported by the BIOS and use the entire disk for FreeBSD? Any
> tips would be very welcome!
>
> Kalle
>
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