Sysinstall's fdisk/disklabel should be improved

[Mark Nipper]

On 28 Oct 2003, David O'Brien wrote:
> 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.

	This is true.  And while I disagree with some of the
initial complaints, I do think that fdisk/disklabel in sysinstall
need to be improved upon.  They do not handle multi-terabyte disk
arrays properly at all (unless something has changed since
5.1-RELEASE) and as array sizes increase, it seems like this
would be an issue to address lest people think that FreeBSD is
not geared toward middle range server duties, which it most
obviously handles exceptionally well.  :)

	Having said that, I had to reflect a few seconds myself
to figure out how to actually tell fdisk to go into dangerously
dedicated mode, but it wasn't entirely impossible.  It just
wasn't entirely intuitive (although at the moment I cannot
imagine why it wouldn't have been!).  It's been awhile since I
used it admittedly.

	If you want truly user unfriendly, try using
fdisk/disklabel post installation, which both DO handle large
slice/partition sizes properly, and through which I finally
realized my 1638492118Kb RAID-5 partition.  :)

-- 
Mark Nipper                                                e-contacts:
Computing and Information Services                      nipsy at tamu.edu
Texas A&M University                        http://ops.tamu.edu/nipsy/
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(979)575-3193                                      MSN: nipsy at tamu.edu

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