Sysinstall's fdisk/disklabel should be improved

[David O'Brien]

On Sun, Oct 26, 2003 at 06:58:52PM +0100, Ulrich Spoerlein wrote:
> First of all, the Partition Editor has the 'A' option to use all of the
> available HDD space. It creates a DOS-compatible slice (starting at
> sector 63 and ending on cylinder boundary). This is completely useless
> on servers and the help menu says that sysinstall will ask if it should
> create a DOS-compatible slice or not. However no such question is ever
> asked.

It is NOT useless.  Why do you think it is?  Perhaps you don't relize
that some BIOS's wont boot from a hard disk that isn't partitioned to
agree with the specifications of the PeeCee.  If you want to treat your
PC as a Sun, don't -- buy a Sun, FreeBSD runs on that too.


> Ok, then the solution would be to drop to a shell and run fdisk by hand.
> However there is no fdisk/disklabel/newfs in that shell. Even 'ls' is
> not found. Running the LiveCD will give you a working fdisk/disklabel
> but the man-pages are not useable (manpath.config can't be found).

You're going to a lot of trouble just to "save" %1 of the "available"
disk space...