Re: FDisk won't detect or accept correct disk geometry from BIOS

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To: "Derrick Ryalls" <ryallsd@datasphereweb.com>
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 17:48:51 -0800

> My thought here is to double check that the drive is in the master
> position on the ribbon.

Yeah, you would _think_ that would be the way to configure things. But when
I configure the two devices that way (CD-ROM as slave, hard drive as
master), sysinstall refuses to mount the CD, giving me an error about
"CD/DVD drive not found!". It's worth noting that no other OS I've run on
this same PC ever had any trouble finding the CD-ROM drive when it was
configured as the slave.

To get around _that_ problem, I had to configure the CD-ROM as the master
and the hard drive as the slave. With the CD-ROM as the master, sysinstall
is able to actually detect the CD/DVD drive, but then I run into this
nonsense with fdisk refusing to detect or accept the correct disk geometry
for the hard drive. It's worth noting that I've never had to manually
specify hard drive geometry settings in the installer for any other OS I've
installed on this PC. They figured it out automatically and worked fine.

If I just let fdisk use its suggested defaults for the geometry and proceed
with the install, then when the system reboots off the hard drive I get
"Missing operating system". It's worth noting that I've never seen that
severe of an error following any other OS installation claiming it was
successful.

So far, I'm really disappointed by FreeBSD. If FreeBSD lacks the logic or
detection to automatically figure all these things out and just work, that
is a serious bug (whether due to a programmer mistake or poor software
design). I've _never_ had this much trouble getting an operating system
installed on this particular PC.

If I can't get things working within about 1 more hour of tinkering, I'm
going to abandon FreeBSD entirely, put my machine back together, and just
use the drive as an extra NTFS filesystem for my personal files under
Windows XP.

When people argue that Windows is easier, and that *nix isn't ready for the
desktop, this is *exactly* the kind of problem that they are talking about.
I hope any actual FreeBSD developers on these aliases wake up and take
notice.
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• Previous message: Mark: "Re: Sendmail 8.12.11"
• In reply to: Derrick Ryalls: "RE: FDisk won't detect or accept correct disk geometry from BIOS"
• Next in thread: W. Sierke: "Re: FDisk won't detect or accept correct disk geometry from BIOS"
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