Re: fdisk issue

["Michael Neumann" <mneumann@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 19:13:04 +0200, Matthew Dillon  
<dillon@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