Dangerous file system / disk problem

[Ben Paley]

On Monday 07 June 2004 16:44, Malcolm Kay wrote:

>
> Notice the size recorded for this slice is zero.
>
> If the "cylinders=155061 heads=16 sectors/track=63" is somewhere
> near the reasonable possible geometry description then virtually
> the entire disk has been allocated to the FreeBSD slice.

Yes it is, all of it (or, all of it that I could withot going 'dangerously 
dedicated'). I have never had any intention of putting Windows on this disk. 
I think W98 just assumed it 'cos it was the primary master.

>The slice editor in sysinstall shows this for
> > ad1:
> >
> > Offset		Size(ST)		End			Name	PType	Desc		Subtype    Flags
> >
> > 0			63			62			-		12		unused	0
> > 63			156296322		156296384 	ad1s1	8		freebsd	165
> > 156296385		5103			156301487		-		12		unused	0
>
> And this agrees that the second slice is almost non-existent -- 2.5Mb --
> certainly not enough for windows.

No. But Windows is runing quite happily on ad0 (or "c:\" :-)

>
> I wonder whether you had the BIOS re-detect the disks after the swap.
> Maybe the BIOS still thinks the size is that of the disk previously in that
> position. And sysinstall and windows are both confused by the near zero
> apparent size of the windows partition.

No, the BIOS knows where the disks are, autodetects with no problem, and the 
defaults it offers match whats on the disk label (I mean the physical, paper 
label on the metal disk housing!) - and Windows is fine on the other disk - 
the problem is, really, that there shouldn't be a windows partition on _this_ 
disk at all.

>
> What do you believe is the total disk capacity?

80Gb, nominally.

su-2.05b# df -h
Filesystem     	Size    	Used   	Avail 	Capacity 	Mounted on
/dev/ad1s1a    	989M    	415M    	496M   	 46%    	/
devfs          	1.0K    	1.0K      	0B   		100%   	 /dev
/dev/ad1s1e   	 496M    	5.0M    	451M     	1%    	/tmp
/dev/ad1s1f     	69G     	13G     	51G    	20%    	/usr
/dev/ad1s1d    	496M    	136M    	320M    	30%    	/var
procfs         	4.0K    	4.0K      	0B   		100%    	/proc
[cut - the rest is about ad0]

> Since the slice 2 size is less than 32Mb then sysinstall knows that it
> can't really have a sysid of 14.

If you say so! It knows more than me about disk geometry and so on, I guess.

But seriously, does any of this suggest a course of action to you? I'm 
planning to try the "set sysid to 0" plan... what if that doesn't work?

The fact is I really don't understand in any kind of detail how this stuff 
works - I'm just trying to ask the right questions...

Thanks a lot for taking the time to think about this, I appreciate it.

Cheers,
Ben