avoid FreeBSD 4.0 -- it might FUBAR your large IDE disk

avoid FreeBSD 4.0 -- it might FUBAR your large IDE disk

Post by Mr. Biddleswort » Sun, 06 Aug 2000 04:00:00



For others who have large IDE disks with multiple partitions,
I recommend avoiding FreeBSD 4.0.

I allocated a 2GB primary partition for BSD on a 30GB IDE disk,
and I did tell the fdisk program the proper C/H/S geometry.

Well, after installation, upon trying to boot BSD for the first time,
I discovered that my entire disk was FUBARed, so bad in fact,
that I had to repartition the disk.

I'll stay with Red Hat Linux.

--
Mr. Biddlesworth

 
 
 

avoid FreeBSD 4.0 -- it might FUBAR your large IDE disk

Post by Phillip Musumec » Mon, 07 Aug 2000 04:00:00



> For others who have large IDE disks with multiple partitions,
> I recommend avoiding FreeBSD 4.0.

> I allocated a 2GB primary partition for BSD on a 30GB IDE disk,
> and I did tell the fdisk program the proper C/H/S geometry.

It sounds like the following is what has happened:

- use other OS tools to partition disk in some way, leaving a portion of
  the disk not defined within any partition;
- installed some other OS;
- tried installing FreeBSD-4.0 using its partition tools to create
  an additional partition in the unused disk.

Can you boot up some other OS and double check what the partition
arrangement settings now are on your disk (you don't need BSD for this).

People on this newsgroup who are trying to improve the install systems will
need some facts to work on.  It would be helpful to describe what tools
originally partitioned the disk (I assume some other tools were used
otherwise how did you ever have anything on the disk that could be lost).

Cheers,
phillip

--

UNIX _IS_ user friendly.  It's just selective about who its friends are.
                                                                --unknown

 
 
 

avoid FreeBSD 4.0 -- it might FUBAR your large IDE disk

Post by Y ? r i » Mon, 07 Aug 2000 04:00:00


had no problem with 60GB ATA66 + Promise Ultra66.
have NT 4.0, FreeBSD and Mandrake 7.1 installed with
NT  -  15 GB
and FreeBSD+Mandrake 7.1 splitting evenly the rest.
booting with Grub that comes with Mandrake, also used FreeBSD bootloader
without any problem.

I am very new to this unix world, so i can not comment on specifics.
i would rather install Debian instead of Mandrake to learn it, but knowledge
is at subzero level so far and i suspect i would install it over Promise.

 
 
 

avoid FreeBSD 4.0 -- it might FUBAR your large IDE disk

Post by Richard Tob » Mon, 07 Aug 2000 04:00:00




>For others who have large IDE disks with multiple partitions,
>I recommend avoiding FreeBSD 4.0.

The new ata driver in FreeBSD 4.0 did have serious problems with DMA
on some chipsets (VIA MVP3 I think).  This seems to have been fixed in
4.1.

-- Richard
--
Spam filter: to mail me from a .com/.net site, put my surname in the headers.

printf("%.*s\n", len, str);

 
 
 

avoid FreeBSD 4.0 -- it might FUBAR your large IDE disk

Post by Mr. Biddleswort » Tue, 08 Aug 2000 04:00:00






>>For others who have large IDE disks with multiple partitions, I
>>recommend avoiding FreeBSD 4.0.

> The new ata driver in FreeBSD 4.0 did have serious problems with DMA on
> some chipsets (VIA MVP3 I think).  This seems to have been fixed in
> 4.1.

> -- Richard

Thanks for the info.

My PC does have a VIA MVP3 chipset.
That probably explains the "disk transfer error (-1)" messages
I saw while installing from CDROM.

--
Mr. Biddlesworth

 
 
 

1. Rescue disk with support for large IDE disk?

Hi there,

My linux system has crashed with disk errors; whenever I try to startup
(using loadlin from DOS); I get the beginnings of a successful startup,
followed by a sequence of disk errors, and finally a kernel panic and the
system hangs.

So I'm trying to get into the system using a rescue disk; I've got hold of
two: rescue02, and resque_disk.2.0.22, both of which look good.  Trouble
is, I have a 1.2 Gb IDE disk, and thus the parameters need somehow to be
passed to the kernel (via LILO), so that linux can access /dev/hda2 and
/dev/hda3 for me to e2fsck them and correct any disk errors.

Does anybody know the secrets of this?  I've tried fiddling with
lilo.conf files on both rescue disks but so far to no avail.  It's *very*
annoying, and I would dearly welcome some advice or help.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

cheers,
        Alasdair

--
Alasdair McAndrew               Dept. of Computer and Mathematical Sciences

Fax:   +61 3 9688 4050          P.O. 14428, Melbourne City Mail Centre        
Phone: +61 3 9688 4344          Melbourne, Vic 8001, Australia            

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