*BSD News Article 43375


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From: PGOLDA@eleceng.uct.ac.za (Pete Golda)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Q: FreeBSD and crappy IDE cards
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 11:05:45 GMT
Organization: University of Cape Town
Lines: 33
Message-ID: <PGOLDA.214.795092745@eleceng.uct.ac.za>
NNTP-Posting-Host: sar-lbr.ee.uct.ac.za

Hi,

I'm sure this question has been asked thousands of times, so please
point me to a FAQ or something...

I have an 850 meg Conner hard drive in my IBM PC compatible, and I
have a standard IDE controller card.

The hard disk came with a "Disk Manager" from Ontrack ( I'm not sure
about the name.. ). This disk manager modifies the Master Boot Record
by adding a driver that allows my standard IDE card to "see" the whole
hard drive ( IDE cards only see up to +/- 500 meg ). This is all
working fine.

So now I have a 400 meg DOS partition, and 450 meg just sitting there
unassigned to anything. I want to install FreeBSD on this 450 meg. 
Before doing so I got the INSTALL documentation for FreeBSD in which I 
found a reference to "Disk Manager" programs and such. Basically it 
seems that I cannot install FreeBSD because I have this driver for my 
IDE card.

Is there ANY way I can install FreeBSD on my system ?

If not, would I have to buy an EIDE ( Extended IDE ) card, which
requires no software driver ?

If I attempted to install FreeBSD just to see if it works anyway,
is the data in my DOS partition in danger of being deleted ?

Thanks for your help,
Pete.