Sysinstall's fdisk/disklabel should be improved

[Ian Freislich]

"David O'Brien" wrote:
> 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.

Hmmm, not a reason why it's useless, but certainly one case where
it just plain doesn't work:  I have some SCSI disks which my BIOS
refuses to boot unless dangerously dedicated.  Any ideas are welcome.

They are all the same as this:

da0: <SEAGATE ST34502LW 0005> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-2 device 
da0: 40.000MB/s transfers (20.000MHz, offset 8, 16bit), Tagged Queueing Enabled
da0: 4340MB (8888924 512 byte sectors: 64H 32S/T 4340C)

Ian