fdisk issue

Michael Neumann mneumann at ntecs.de
Thu Aug 16 01:52:27 PDT 2007


On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 19:13:04 +0200, Matthew Dillon  
<dillon at apollo.backplane.com> wrote:

:Hm, but I think this never really happens! FreeBSD doesn't do that (they
:even don't have an option to set all 1's), and I think no one ever had
:problems with it.
:
:Regards,
:
:   Michael
    Well, I've come across systems where you have to have all 1's in
    there if you have an oversized disk or it doesn't work.  I have
    also come across systems where the reverse is true.  And I've come
    across other systems where nothing works unless you go into setup
    and explicitly put the disk into Large mode.
    It's annoying for sure, especially with laptops because sometimes
    you have to pop the hard drive just to get the thing to boot from
    CD, even with the boot order set to CD-first.
    I don't think there is a satisfactory solution that works for all
    cases.  At this point I think more systems probably expect all 1's
    then expect wrapped numbers but that is just a guess.
Agreed. In my case, the easiest way is to just skip the fdisk dialog
provided by bsdinstaller to avoid my BIOS hangups. If I'd need to modify my
disk partitions, I could simply escape to shell and modify the partitions
using the -C option.
Well, I was mostly concerned about the case when an unexperienced user want
to try out DragonFly and the same happens to him that happened to me, he'd
probably never ever try to install DragonFly again and maybe worse he could
tell bad things about DF. But I think, this scenario is not yet real ;-)
Regards,

  Michael





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