*BSD News Article 75838


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From: Ken Bigelow <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: What cylinder to start from?
Date: Sat, 10 Aug 1996 05:56:53 -0700
Organization: A poorly-installed InterNetNews site
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Message-ID: <320C8715.267B@www.play-hookey.com>
References: <32093D6A.1102@aloha.net> <320B510E.7416@www.play-hookey.com> <4uguaj$sjd@baygull.rtd.com>
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Don Yuniskis wrote:
> 
> In article <320B510E.7416@www.play-hookey.com>,
> Ken Bigelow  <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com> wrote:
> >DuckHunter wrote:
> >>
> >> As you can see, I''m a full blown neophyte when it comes to hardware,
> >> what cylinder should I specify to start from in FIPS if I don't want it
> >> to overwrite any of my existing Win95/Dos files? Should I just leave
> >> enough space in the 'old' partition to cover all of the files? And not
> >> worry about what cylinder to start from?
> >
> >FIPS won't overwrite active data, so you needn't worry about that. For
> >the rest, you'll need to decide how much space to allocate to FreeBSD,
> >and how much to leave for Win95. That depends on the intended size of
> >your installation and whatever you'll want to do with it. No one else can
> >decide that for you.
> 
> You might want to searh through the mailing list archives *before*
> doing this... Win95 and FBSD have had problems coexisting in the
> past.  Also, FIPS has reportedly caused problems...
> 
> Perhaps someone with the latest dope will elaborate...?

Win95 has problems with everything that isn't Win95, and with some things 
that are. The latest problem I've heard of is that Win95 has a bug that 
can screw up an extended DOS partition, and possibly even the primary 
partition (read 'slice' for BSD) if an extended partition is present. A 
patch is available from Microslop.

In any case, it has also been established in those earlier posts that 
FreeBSD and Win95 *can* coexist on the same hard drive if certain 
precautions are taken. Since 'DuckHunter' already has a Win95 partition 
he *can* shrink it with FIPS, clean out the 'extra' primary DOS partition 
left behind, and then install FreeBSD in the remaining space.

What he *cannot* do is mount the DOS partition under FreeBSD, because the 
clusters are too big for the logical size of the DOS partition. (He could 
use fdisk to kill off the DOS partition entirely and then re-create it, 
and then format that DOS partition from a DOS system floppy. Then the 
clusters will be the correct size and FreeBSD can access the partition. 
But is it worth all that trouble? It's his choice.)
-- 
Ken

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