*BSD News Article 45874


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From: james@jraynard.demon.co.uk (James Raynard)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: I need help installing 2.0.5 with Ontrack
Date: 23 Jun 1995 00:07:20 -0000
Organization: A FreeBSD box
Lines: 22
Message-ID: <3sd0jo$10n@jraynard.demon.co.uk>
References: <3rps45$o6j@acmey.gatech.edu> <DAGq5K.617@citylink.dinoex.sub.org> <kientzleDAL19n.6Ln@netcom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.jraynard.demon.co.uk
Keywords: ontrack
X-NNTP-Posting-Host: wilde.tecc.co.uk

In article <kientzleDAL19n.6Ln@netcom.com>,  <kientzle@netcom.com> wrote:
>    Not necessarily (at least not under 2.0R).  I had to manually
>tell BSD fdisk the correct geometry when I set up my 1gb drive
>for DOS (300Mb) and BSD (700Mb+), even though all the CMOS settings
>were correct and there was no special driver active.  I'm not sure
>where BSD fdisk gets its initial geometry ideas from, but it's not
>always reliable.

I had a lot of problems with disk geometry when I installed 2.0R, even though
my hard disk is a plain IDE Conner 420MB. For some reason, FreeBSD insisted 
that it was a Conner 340MB. Entering the correct geometry in fdisk was no use 
- it accepted the correct values, but changed them back to the old values when 
I tried to edit the partitions!

In the end, I found that doing a binary-only installation, editing the
disklabel, and then re-installing, did the trick. (Actually Linux's fdisk 
works as well, but that's not in the right spirit 8-)

James
-- 
Segmentation fault (core dumped): cannot find file '.signature'