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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!news.ti.com!news.dseg.ti.com!news From: rnestor@ti.com (Bob Nestor) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Help with MSDOS Partitions Date: 19 Apr 1996 20:38:04 GMT Organization: Systems Group, Texas Instruments Lines: 36 Message-ID: <4l8tjc$c16@mksrv1.dseg.ti.com> Reply-To: rnestor@metronet.com,rnestor@ti.com NNTP-Posting-Host: cna0188378.dseg.ti.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=US-ASCII X-Newsreader: WinVN 0.99.7 As they say, I'm sure this is a dumb question, but I could use some expert assistance and enlightenment. I'm trying to get FreeBSD 2.1 configured on my Gateway 2000 P5-133 using the BSDisc distribution. My Gateway has a Western Digital Cavair 31600 disk drive which holds 1549Meg. The drive configuration is 3148 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors. Under DOS the Geometry seems to be 786 cylinders, 64 heads, 63 sectors using a cluster size of 64. I've verified this with pfdisk and it's also what shows up in the "fdisk" paameters during FreeBSD installation, and yes I'm doing the "Novice" Install, and no I didn't screw with the Geometry. Using the "fips" utility I partitioned the disk so that DOS occupies the first 256 cylinders starting with sector 63 for a length of 1036161 sectors. SCANDISK and all are quite happy with this arrangement. Going into the FreeBSD Install I specify that I want to use half of the remaining space for BSD. This goes from cylinger 257 through 521 for sectors 1036224 through 1068480. FreeBSD is quite happy about this and everything installs as requested from the CDROM! The system boots and seems to run just fine. Kewl! Now here's the problem: When I attempt to mount_msdos my dos partition, I get errors saying the length is not a multiple of the clustersize. Well, yes that's true - 1036161 sectors is not evenly divisable by 64. But I didn't have any control over this. As far as I can tell I did everything according to the book, and it doesn't work. So I must have overlooked something quite simple and obvious, which for the life of me I can't figure out. Can some kind soul help me out and lead me through this maze of twisty passages that all look alike? Thanks, -bob rnestor@ti.com P.S. Would prefer E-Mail response as my News System is rather shakey and has a very small short term memory.