From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jul 3 23:25:32 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from server.baldwin.cx (server.geekhouse.net [64.81.6.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AC6FE37B5E3 for ; Mon, 3 Jul 2000 23:25:27 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from john@baldwin.cx) Received: from john.baldwin.cx (root@john.baldwin.cx [192.168.1.18]) by server.baldwin.cx (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id XAA31874; Mon, 3 Jul 2000 23:25:21 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from john@baldwin.cx) Received: (from john@localhost) by john.baldwin.cx (8.9.3/8.9.3) id XAA37705; Mon, 3 Jul 2000 23:26:16 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from john) Message-Id: <200007040626.XAA37705@john.baldwin.cx> X-Mailer: XFMail 1.4.0 on FreeBSD X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20000703221858.I42727@shell.wetworks.org> Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2000 23:26:16 -0700 (PDT) From: John Baldwin To: Alan Clegg Subject: Re: install fails on 10.2 GB drive using 4.0 Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, "Kim J. Brand" Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 04-Jul-00 Alan Clegg wrote: > An SMTP stream claimed that Kim J. Brand muttered: > >> i fdisked/formatted the drive with a spare WIN98 Boot Disk, then i deleted >> the partition using the 4.0 partition utility, and it WORKED!! > > I would have been interested to know if booting from a recovery disk > and then doing a 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/_whatever_ count=10' would > have done the same thing. Not always. That zeros the MBR, so sysinstall is then required to guess at the geometry used by the BIOS, which it might rarely get wrong. If you format it with DOS, then DOS will use the BIOS geometry and create a valid MBR with it, which we can use in sysinstall to extract the BIOS geometry for the drive. > AlanC -- John Baldwin -- http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/ PGP Key: http://www.cslab.vt.edu/~jobaldwi/pgpkey.asc "Power Users Use the Power to Serve!" - http://www.FreeBSD.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message