Re: Benchmarking

[Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@xxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Dillon said on Mar  8, 2004 at 09:57:19:
>     What this all means is that diagnosing boot block installation problems
>     is difficult at best if one does not start with a clean slate. 
> 
>     If someone wants to submit a patch for the README to clarify the issue,
>     please do!

Here's a diff... but I also wanted to insert a note of using fdisk
interactively to change partition types (a very common situation), but
couldn't figure out the command from the manpage (fdisk /dev/ad0 just
seems to print out the partition table).  I did it on my machine with
the FreeBSD install much earlier and didn't need to mess with it
again.

Rahul

--- README	Tue Mar  9 01:55:50 2004
+++ README.new	Tue Mar  9 02:24:22 2004
@@ -23,27 +23,41 @@
     Manual installation of DragonFly onto an HD involve the following sequence
     of commands.  You must be familiar with BSD style UNIX systems to do
     installations manually.  The primary IDE hard drive is typically 'ad0'
-    and DragonFly is typically installed onto the first slice (ad0s1).
-    SCSI disks are named 'da[0-9]'.
+    and DragonFly is typically installed onto the first free slice
+    (ad0s1 if disk is empty, ad0s2 if your first slice contains
+    another OS, etc).   If you have no free slices, either back up,
+    repartition and reinstall, or use resizing software such as
+    qtparted or Partition Magic.  SCSI disks are named 'da[0-9]'.
 
-
-	# This COMPLETELY WIPES and repartitions your hard drive.  Sometimes
-	# old boot blocks can interfere with the initialization process, which
-	# is why we zero-out the start of the disk before running fdisk.
+	# OPTIONAL STEP: If your disk is already partitioned and you
+	# have a spare primary partition on which you want to install
+	# Dragonfly, skip this step.  However, sometimes old boot
+	# blocks or cruft in the boot area can interfere with the
+	# initialization process.  A cure is to zero out the start of
+	# the disk before running fdisk.
+	#
+	# WARNING: This COMPLETELY WIPES and repartitions your hard drive.
 	#
 	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=32k count=16
 	fdisk -IB ad0
 
+	# If you didn't zero the disk as above, but have a spare slice
+	# whose partition type you want to change to UFS, use fdisk(8)
+
+
 	# This installs boot blocks onto the HD and verifies their 
 	# installation.  See note just above the 'reboot' below for
-	# things to try if it does not boot from your HD.
+	# things to try if it does not boot from your HD.  If you
+	# already have a multi-OS bootloader installed, such as lilo
+	# or grub, you may want to skip this step.
 	#
 	boot0cfg -B ad0
 	boot0cfg -v ad0
 
-	# This creates an initial label on the first slice of the HD.  If
+	# This creates an initial label on the chosen slice of the HD.  If
 	# you have problems booting you could try wiping the first 32 blocks
-	# of the slice with dd and then reinstalling the label
+	# of the slice with dd and then reinstalling the label.
+	# Replace ad0s1 with the chosen slice
 	#
 	# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0s1 bs=32k count=16
 	disklabel -B -r -w ad0s1 auto