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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 User support services +X+ Voice: +27 21 650 3025 Information Technology Services, /+\ This .sig is umop ap!sdn University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, South Africa