From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Jun 7 17:08:58 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id RAA07071 for questions-outgoing; Fri, 7 Jun 1996 17:08:58 -0700 (PDT) Received: from time.cdrom.com (time.cdrom.com [204.216.27.226]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id RAA07063 for ; Fri, 7 Jun 1996 17:08:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.7.5/8.6.9) with SMTP id RAA17277; Fri, 7 Jun 1996 17:08:41 -0700 (PDT) To: "Dave Blizzard" cc: "questions" Subject: Re: FreeBSD NOT In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 07 Jun 1996 20:34:22 EDT." Date: Fri, 07 Jun 1996 17:08:41 -0700 Message-ID: <17275.834192521@time.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-questions@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > 1) I have now installed the BSD by turning off my IDE drive. As long as I boo t > from a floppy, it seems to work fine. So far no corruption of the IDE drive's > partition table. (touch wood) Sounds like an annoying yet workable solution. > 2) I used the A option for partitioning the SCSI drive and therefore am no > longer worrying about the geometry. The disklabel still sees the drive as > about 300mb too large so I am manually reducing the size of the /USR so that > the system won't try and write to the non-existent space. That's very weird - I wonder if this is a broken SCSI drive reporting its size incorrectly? > 3) do you have any problems with the /dev/lpt0 driver? This device works grea t > for me in dos but the lptest > /dev/lpt0 prints blank pages. (the kernel is > set to use the IRQ 7) You should install apsfilter - see /usr/ports/print > 2) The installer destroys the partition table of the IDE drive even if the Well, it's supposed to install a boot manager on "drive zero", which is the only way you can "chain boot" multiple drives. I'm not sure if you selected the IDE drive or not. > 3) Even though the install seems to go without errors, the bootmgr uses virus > technology (sic) to install itself in track 0 sector 1. This cannot be remove d > by using fdisk /mbr as it also seems that the track is write protected. Even > diskedit cannot zero out the sector. This has cause several screaming fits That doesn't make much sense as I wipe out FreeBSD's boot manger with `fdisk /mbr' all the time. Something is definitely odd with your system. > SOMEONE WHOULD WARN USERS OF THIS. But it only happens to you.. :-) > 4 Even if I put a small BSD partition on the IDE drive for root and swap, the > BSD fdisk still screws up the SCSI partitions (thinks the drive is much large r > than reality) and then destroys the IDE drive. Erm. All I can really say is that you must have one of those hardware combinations that frightens small children and FreeBSD.. :-) For the record, I *never* recommend mixing IDE and SCSI in the same box. There's just too much weirdness involving which one "wins" at being able to stick its drives in as 0x80 and 0x81. I've come across this situation twice in my charity consulting work and each time performed an "IDEdectomy" to remove the IDE drives, after which everything worked just great. That shall continue to be my recommendation until people stop building PC configurations with a built-in gun aimed at their feet. Jordan