Installer seems to overwrite partition table

Michael Neumann mneumann at ntecs.de
Wed Apr 16 06:52:24 PDT 2008


Simon 'corecode' Schubert wrote:
Michael Neumann wrote:
Matthew Dillon wrote:
:Simon 'corecode' Schubert wrote:
:> Didn't I want to change the default back to -C?  I think it is very
bad t=
:> o create a slice table which hangs some machines.
:
:Yep, but I think Matt was against it. I wouldn't change the default
:itself, but instead modify the installer to use -C by default (or at
:least make it an option).
:
:Regards,
:
:   Michael
    Using -C will break more things then it will fix.  Hard drives
    have been large enough to overflow the CHS fields for years now,
    and wrapped values can confuse the hell out of bioses probably even
    worse now verses using all 1's.
Agreed. But it is desireable for those of us that have screwed bioses,
to be able to install DragonFly on it without the need to perform all
the installation commands by hand (fdisk, cpdup etc.), just because
the installer does not pass "-C" to fdisk.
I'd like to see a "options for fdisk" setting in the installer, in the
same way as you can specify options to newfs (at least in FreeBSD).
How does linux' cfdisk/fdisk handle it?  How does Windows do it?  I guess they don't smash the slice table, so we should take a look there, I'd say.
I don't know. FreeBSD just has -C as default. The fdisk from NetBSD has 
only little code in common with FreeBSD's fdisk. And NetBSD's version 
also doesn't have this problem (it seems to determine the correct values).

Regards,

  Michael






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