disk management

[Gary W. Swearingen]

Dick Hoogendijk <dick at nagual.st> writes:

> So let me ask you:
>
> If I delete the XP partition (i.e. with the fbsd fdisk progam) and write
> the partition table back to disk, will this ruin my third fbsd part?

If you want to be real careful, save off a copy of the MBR (to
floppy?) with something like:  dd if=/dev/ad0 of=MBR count=1
or slight less safely using "boot0cfg -f MBR" (incomplete cmd).

You can even use "dd...|hd" or the fdisk of a Linux Live CD to examine
the partition table, so you're sure where your current FreeBSD
partition is located.

As for your question, one can only say "it shouldn't".  I doubt if
it changes the partition table at all, but I don't know for sure.
It certainly doesn't touch the partition itself.

I can't help with MSFT stuff, thru lack of experience.

> The scary part is that there seems to be a misunderstanding of my disk
> by Microsoft programs (using a LBA disk setting) and my FreeBSD (using
> CHS settings). I can only put ONE option on in the bios though ;-)

Since it was an option, my BIOSes have always been set to LBA, and
FreeBSD (and Linux) seem to use both LBA and CHS in different places,
keeping me confused, but I've never needed to use non-LBA.