Unable to install on large hard drive

[Christopher Kelley]

Steve Bertrand wrote:

>>I have a small partition for the windows system that is 5 
>>gig, a large partition for programs and data that is 18 gig, 
>>and around 15 gig left for fBSD.  The installer squawks about 
>>the drive geometry, and says it will use a more sane 
>>geometry.  I set up the slices and it doesn't squawk about 
>>writing them, and then attempts to install the system.  I 
>>immediately get an error "Write failure on transfer!" and it 
>>can't seem to write anything to the drive.
>>
>>    
>>
>
>This may be the wrong approach, but what exactly are you feeding to the
>installer in regards to space per filesystem?
>
>ie:
>
>- 250m (for /)
>- xxxm (for swap)
>- xm (for /usr)
>- etc etc
>  
>
/ - 512m
swap - 1024m (2x system memory)
/var - 512m
/usr - the rest (something like 12g or so)

This setup has worked for me in other computers, but this is the first 
time I've had such a large drive, or tried dual booting.

>I've ignored those errors in the past, and have had no difficulty. This
>has occurred since the 4.x days for me. Mind you, I never have (and god
>willing) never will run a Windows system alongside FBSD, but perhaps
>trying to feed it what you want for the most of the filesystems, and
>when you get to the last, just accept the default block amount that FBSD
>provides you with, and let it use the rest.
>  
>
That's what I did.  It's not writing *anything*, so I doubt filesystem 
size has anything to do with it.  I tried accepting the default fBSD 
geometry as well as a couple other seemingly "obvious" choices with the 
same results.

>>The good news is, it isn't harming my windows partitions.  I 
>>can easily boot back into windows and everything there works.
>>    
>>
>
>I'd suggest backing up your data on the Windows partition(s) if you have
>anything crutially important (especially if you are not familiar with
>recovering data), before you keep hammering at it.
>
>Steve
>  
>
Nothing important on my windows partitions.  I have a separate file 
server where all the data goes.  But thanks for the warning. :)

Christopher