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From: awnbreel@panix.com (Michael R Weholt)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Notes on a Win95/FreeBSD, 2 drive installation.
Date: Sun, 16 Feb 97 17:30:12 GMT
Organization: Rookery Prawl
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I just had an Excellent Adventure installing FreeBSD on a
2-drive Win95 system. Inasmuch as I did not find anything in the
existing documentation that addressed what I was trying to do (or if
it did, the documentation for reasons you will see was not
applicable), I thought I would write out some notes on what I learned
for the benefit of those who might want to do what I was trying to do.
Sorry for the length of this post, but I tried to give as much
detail as I could since, as we all know, the Daemon is in the Details.
The system is a Win95 Gateway pentium, 40megs memory, with a
master drive of 1.6gigs, and a slave drive of 850megs (both Western
Digital EIDE). Note that to keep confusion to a minimum, in the
discussion below I refer to these as Drive 1 and Drive 2 (rather than
using FreeBSD's view of the matter, i.e., drives 0 and 1). The Win95
came installed on my Gateway and it is the FAT16 version. I have a CD
drive (Mitsumi).
I was installing 2.2GAMMA-970205 which I downloaded from
ftp4.FreeBSD.ORG. I selected the "User" option (basically just bin &
manpages) during the installation, and I installed from the Primary
Dos Partition on the second drive (see below).
A while back, to reduce 'slack' space on the Dos partitions, I
repartitioned both drives (using Dos's FDISK) into the following
configuration:
Master Disk: Primary Dos Partition: Drive C:, ~500megs
(1.6gig) Extended Dos Partition: Drive E:, ~500megs
Drive F:, ~240megs
Drive G:, ~240megs
Drive H:, ~110megs
Slave Disk: Primary Dos Partition: Drive D:, ~240megs
(850meg) Extended Dos Partition: FreeBSD, ~575megs
What I *wanted* to do was install FreeBSD on Drive 2, put the
FreeBSD swap space on Drive 1 (the space occupied by Drive H: above),
and then mount a largish Dos partition so that data I put there would
be accessible to both Dos and FreeBSD (the space occupied by Drive E:
above).
FreeBSD installed easily enough onto drive 2. For some
reason, I had to use "BOOTINST.EXE" to get Boot Easy onto both drives
(but it works fine now). I was able to mount the Primary Dos
Partition on Drive 2 (Drive D:) as a "shared space". I use Drive D:
as a backup space for zipped Win95 stuff from Drive 1. Drive C: is
where I keep Win95 and those apps that insist on co-habitating with
it. I didn't really want to use those spaces as "shared spaces", but
(as you'll see) I didn't seem to have much choice.
In =The Complete FreeBSD=, pp.21ff (and, I believe, in other
places in the documentation, though I can't find the references at the
moment), you will read that you can use Dos's FDISK to cut your disk
up into 4 Dos partitions. It turns out that in the case of the FDISK
that comes with my version of Win95, that is not true. The most it
will let me do is create one primary dos partition, and *one* extended
dos partition. After the one extended partition has been created, you
can then divide it up into various logical drives. Drives E: through
H: on my Drive 1 (see above) are all logical drives contained in my
one and only extended drive.
The reason this is important is because (as I discovered when
I attempted to designate my Drive H: as FreeBSD's swap space), FreeBSD
cannot see these logical drives. All you get in the Partition Editor
Screen (during FreeBSD installation) is the Primary Dos Partition and
the large Extended Dos Partition. In order to "give a space" to
FreeBSD, that space has to be marked "unused" in FreeBSD's Partition
Editor. Obviously, I am not going to mark my Primary Dos Partition,
Drive C:, unused. Nor am I interested in using the entire Dos
Extended Partition as a data space shared by Dos and FreeBSD. If I
did, I'd get into the whole Dos mess of 200-byte batch files taking up
32K worth of disk space. I'm not into it.
In the handbook under "MS-DOS user's Questions and Answers"
(handbook19.html#21), one of the questions is "Can I mount my MS-DOS
extended partitions?" The handbook answers the question "Yes" and
says "the DOS extended partitions are mapped in at the end of the
other 'slices' in FreeBSD, e.g., your D: drive might be /dev/sd0s5,
your E: drive /dev/sd0s6, and so on." (For EIDE drives, you
substitute 'wd' for 'sd'.)
This was encouraging, I thought, but it turns out the parts
about "your D: drive" and "your E: drive" (and so on) are true only if
they are separate Extended Partitions. As I pointed out above, with
my version of FDISK.EXE, the best I can manage is *one* extended
partition, and so these other drives, in my case, are logical drives
and therefore apparently *not* separately mappable by FreeBSD. I can
mount the Primary Dos partition on both Drive 1 and Drive 2, but I
cannot get to the logical drives in the extended partition. I found
this out after much fussing with the mount command in FreeBSD, though
there may be a trick I missed.
So then I got the Extremely Bright Idea of using PFDISK.EXE
(which comes in the tools distribution of FreeBSD) to force into
existence more than one extended partion. Say, whadda' ya' know? It
*worked*. Well, sort of. Near-disastorously.
I *highly* recommend that you do *not* use PFDISK.EXE if you
are using Win95. It may well be that this very warning is in the
documentation somewhere, but I didn't (and don't) recall seeing it.
I was able to create a Primary and 3 extended partitions using
PFDISK, and when I went back into Win95, the extended partitions were
indeed there, and labeled Drive E: through G:. I can live with that,
I thought, but there was a problem. When I tried to create a
directory in one of these drives/extended partitions, I discovered to
my dismay that all long filename support had been lost to those drives
(the Primary Dos partition still had it). That was *not* something I
was willing to live with, so I went back into dos's FDISK and tried to
undo what I had done. After *much* struggle and near-despair, I
succeeded in undoing what I had done, but it weren't easy, folks, and
so my advice is unless you are willing to be shackled to the old 8+3
dos standard, Don't Go There. And even if you *are* willing to live
with it, I will add that the performance of my machine was *severely*
degraded by using PFDISK.EXE in this manner and I believe the machine
came very close to Suicide. Things seem to be OK now, but it was a
very close thing.
So, I settled for the setup I described above, and for using
my Primary Dos partitions on both Drive 1 and Drive 2 as my shared
space.
There's probably other stuff I learned the hard way, but I
don't recall any more at the moment. I hope this helps people, and if
anyone sees a way around any of the problems I encountered, I'd
welcome correction and guidance. All comments welcomed.
Now ... to get down to "Making Friends with FreeBSD". :-)
Michael R Weholt
http://www.panix.com/~mrw/