Installer trashed hard disk contents

Jeroen koffieyahoo at hotmail.com
Tue Jul 13 23:46:16 PDT 2004


I downloaded and installed the 1.0 release yesterday. Unfortunately, the
file system creation part of the installer somehow managed to overwrite the
other partitions on my hard drive. Let me explain.

So this was the situation before installation (on a hard disk of roughly
60GB):

7GB DragonFly primary partition
7GB NTFS primary partition
42GB NTFS primary partition

I selected the first partition for the installer to overwrite. Following
this I divided the partition as follows:

/ 512MB
swap 1024MB
/var 512MB
/tmp 512MB
/usr * (note a star!, should be roughly 4GB)
/home 512MB

The first thing I notice is that it takes quite a long time for the file
system for the /usr to be created (much much longer than what I expected
based on the creation of the other file systems created before it (much much
longer than what I've seen in the past with FreeBSD installers).

Following this the installation finished perfectly and DragonFly also
starts.

However, when I inspect the partition table with fdisk I see the following:

42GB Dragonfly primary partition
7GB NTFS primary partition
42GB NTFS primary partition

This is more than fits on my hard disk (still 60GB :-) Moreover, I'm now
unable to boot the Windows XP on the second partition and I'm also unable to
mount the NTFS file system on the third partition. (The NTFS file system on
the second partition still mounts).

So, I suspect the installer made the DragonFly file system too large and
thus overwrote some of the data in my other partitions.

One other thing that might be related. The NTFS partitions were created with
another head/cylinder mark-up set in the BIOS, than was set during the
DragonFly installation. (Let's call this an historical accident :-)

Jeroen Ketema







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