fdisk drive geometry problem
Perica Veljanovski
FreeBSD at euro.net.mk
Wed Mar 16 05:06:00 PST 2005
Hello
I finally got another hdd for my home box, decided to do a fresh fbsd
install and I ended up with a disk problem :( :
ide0: 40GB [FreeBSD wannabe (ufs2) 10GB, storage2 (fat32) 30GB]
ide2: 40GB [WinXP (ntfs) 10GB, storage1 (fat32) 30GB]
Now when I begin the installation, and go to the partitioning section,
fdisk complains about drive geometry and rearranges the drive. Here are
the settings:
cyls/heads/sectors
19xxx/16/255 (BIOS)
7xxx/16/63 (dmesg "this is what fbsd complains to")
4xxx/255/63 (the new fdisk rearrangement)
and FreeBSD's fdisk seems to get off on setting the head count to 255!!!
I tried setting the bios value and fdisk complains again, but for some
reason when I swap the heads and sectors values it does not. Same goes
for the dmesg values (drive geometry from the dmesg output).
Since I have no experience with changing drive geometry, nor do I
understand the bloody thing, I have several issues:
- Will I loose the data on 'storage2' if I change the drive geometry?
- How should I set up the new drive geometry? What setting is
faster/better? more cyls or more sectors (since fdisk is set to use 255
heads)?
- If I backup 'storage2', change drive geometry as fbsd/fdisk suggests
(or whatever), create a 10g slice and leave the other space
unpartitioned, will I be able to partition and format the drive to fat32
from WinXP?
That's about it... any examples would be great!
thanks ahead!
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