*BSD News Article 21639


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!osuunx.ucc.okstate.edu!moe.ksu.ksu.edu!crcnis1.unl.edu!wupost!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!psgrain!ee.und.ac.za!shrike.und.ac.za!casper.cs.uct.ac.za!hotpcm.its.uct.ac.za!murray
From: murray@its.uct.ac.za (Mark Murray)
Subject: Some installation problems (and a workaround)
Message-ID: <murray.3.2CA99BE3@its.uct.ac.za>
Lines: 50
Sender: news@cs.uct.ac.za (news)
Organization: University of Cape Town
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1993 14:29:55 GMT

Hello World!

I have now done about 8 or 9 successful installations of FreeBSD
(all on Adaptec-type SCSI).

I have a bit of a problem to report, and a suggested workaround:

All of the machines are Dual-Boot, with MS-DOS as the primary (first)
partition.

The problem comes with (I think) the DOS idea of what the partition
table looks like vs the FreeBSD idea.

When an 1542[bc] looks at a large SCSI drive, it translates the actual
heads/sectors/cylinders to a logical format. I have only seen it do
32 sectors per track
64 tracks per cylinder
  (= 1MB per cylinder)
n cylinders per drive where n is the rounded down number of Megs the
  drive has.

FreeBSD probes the drive and arrives at the REAL number of heads,
tracks, cylinders etc.

These two competing methods result in a messed up partition table, and 
usually one has to reboot into DOS and delete the non-DOS partition.

SOLUTION:

1) Ask DOS fdisk to create an extended partition out of the area where
you will be installing BSD.

2) Examine this area with some utility that will make sense of partition
tables. (I use Norton utilities' DISKEDIT)

3) Install FreeBSD but override its idea of tracks, sectors etc with the
values you got in (2) above.

4) Plain sailing!

Hope this helps!

Mark


--
Mark Murray  (ITS/MURRAY)        \+/ Internet: murray@ucthpx.uct.ac.za
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