Very Computer

        Not too long ago I recall that the FAT support under FreeBSD was
considered broken, particularly for writing in a FAT filesystem. Has this been
fixed ? What is the state of FAT support under FreeBSD ?
        Thanks.

                Cheers,
                Dan Ts'o

[ posted and mailed ]

Quote:

> Are you saying that in 2.1.6, you CAN'T install from a DOS partition? If
> so, then how would a DOS user install the DISTs without going by
> floppies. I do not have another FreeBSD system, and would really like to
> install FreeBSD. So far I spent 2 days trying to install it to no avail.
> In the FreeBSD install's "FDISK", I have to delete the DOS partition to
> make the FreeBSD partition, and then it says "cannot find distributions:
> bin, manpages" etc. but they were on my DOS partition. I have also tried
> making an extended DOS partition, then using the Primanry as FreeBSD,
> but then I don't know where to tell it the FreeBSD dists are. I would
> really like to use FreeBSD, but I am getting frustrated. Any help would
> be appreciated.

1) I assume you're wanting to *repartition* your DOS disk?  If so, you
should try the "fips" utility to do it non-destructively (you most
certainly do *not* want to destroy your DOS partition!).  It worked
great for me.  Only problem I encountered with it was that I had to
decompress (had Drivespace 3 compression) and defrag first.

A possibly easier way to do the same would be to spend the $40 or whatever
and get The Partition Magician (a product that well lives up to its name).
Besides doing non-destructive repartitioning, it can also do other nifty
tricks like changing your cluster sizes.  Unfortunately, it doesn't know
anything about FreeBSD partitions (although it does understand Linux), so
it cannot be used to do any magic on an existing FreeBSD partition.

2) OK, once you've done the partitioning from DOS, you need to setup a few
   things:

a) A boot install floppy for FreeBSD.
b) A directory tree (on your DOS drive) of whatever distributions you
   want to install.  You *must* mimic the same directory structure as
   the CD (or ftp site, if you will), i.e., "dists" branching off your
   root directory, and the necessary subdirs under dists (bin, src, etc.).

3) Now, with any luck at all, you can boot the install floppy, choose
   "DOS partition" as your install media (after setting up the necessary
   "slice" information for the FreeBSD partition), select the distributions
   you copied there, and away you go!

Hope this helps somewhat.

--
Conrad Sabatier                  |

http://www.neosoft.com/~conrads  |

:       Not too long ago I recall that the FAT support under FreeBSD was
: considered broken, particularly for writing in a FAT filesystem. Has this been
: fixed ? What is the state of FAT support under FreeBSD ?
:       Thanks.
:
:               Cheers,
:               Dan Ts'o

I guess FAT support is ok, as long as you dont attempt to write back to
the dos partition...

I was using FreeBSD 2.1.5 with a 3gig drive
1gig linux
1gig BSDI
1gig Windoze 95

After I mounted and wrote to the dos partition under FreeBSD 2.1.5, I
recieved messages that /usr was an nonexistent. After more examination,
i found that i had corrupted the freebsd and dos partitions.  To fix the
problem, i reformatted  the dos and freebsd partitions and then restored
the FAT partition from backup.

Matt Bancroft