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Re: Large disk access

Hello,

On Sun, Jan 21, 2001 at 12:22:31PM -0500, Nick Holland wrote:
> Here is how I used a very large (40G) drive with OpenBSD on a box that
> thought 504M was as big as you would ever see:  When you get to the
> point of the install where it asks if you want to use the entire disk
> for OpenBSD, choose YES.
<...>
> I think this should take care of your problem.
> Now, if you tell me you want to use multiple OSs (and thus, multiple
> partitions on each drive), uh, this doesn't help you.

Now, this is the single most annoying thing that I have experienced with
OpenBSD/i386. I know that fdisk is an i386 thinggy only and also that it
has little to zero practical use if you are only BSD, at least in practice,
but still...

I do not know enough about how using the entire disk on OpenBSD works, but
there was a thread about this on FreeBSD mailing lists a while back which
concluded that although by using this mode (named dd in FreeBSD) you can
save a bit of disk space and also may be able to not care about BIOS
geometries, some machines that do not contend themselves with the fake
partition table created in such a case but actually require a vaild fidsk
table in there will not boot in this dedicated mode. Also as I have heard
such disks are not "portable" ie you cannot simply take them out and pop
'em into another case after partitioning them this way, which IMHO also
sucks. For these and a couple related resons this mode is now not even
offered in FreeBSD upon installation so that only those who understand what
they are doing fiddle with it. All others are encouraged to use fdisk.

As I gather this is an "ideological limitation" in OpenBSD (which is quite
alone with this among all the PC OSs...) but I wonder if it will stay this
way... I think the choice and opportunity should be there, and not only in
the form of a Windows boot floppy... after all, BSDs are all about choice,
right?

Just my HUF 0.02...
-- 
Regards:

Szilveszter ADAM
Szeged University
Szeged Hungary