[rescue] It Figures...

[Steve Pacenka]

On Sun, 2002-06-23 at 20:26, George Adkins wrote:

> Yet again, you cannot install to the disk without creating an MS-Dos 
> partition space at the beginning of the disk, and suffering through the 
> idiotic misery of nine-mile-long device names.
 
> Okay, perhaps not nine miles long, but I grow progressively more tired of 
> having to hack each progressive release in order to get rid of the Stupid 
> L**** style dos-compatibility partitioning scheme so that I can get back to a 
> good old 'sd0[a-h]' style slice names.
 
> If I wanted some dumbass 'fake disk slice pointing to an MS-DOS extended 
> partition table entry' I'd just install Dead-Rat or Plebian.

The fdisk included with Dead-Rat and Plebian doesn't require any
explicit DOS partitions on a drive.  I've set up several Linux-only
drives on PCs.  However, that Linux fdisk prevents allocating "cylinder"
zero to any partition.  The "MS-DOS partition space" at the beginning of
a FreeBSD partitioned drive may just be an exposure of the zeroth
cylinder, where the partition table and after-BIOS booter reside.

Does FreeBSD require that its own partitions begin on a cylinder
boundary?  To protect that first couple of sectors required by BIOS it
would have to waste the rest of what it believes to be the zeroth
cylinder.

-- SP