Subject: LBA48 clean boot sequence?
To: None <>
From: Wolfgang S. Rupprecht <>
List: current-users
Date: 11/27/2004 12:04:04
If the bios is LBA48 aware, will netbsd-current/i386 (or /amd64 for
that matter) be able to boot reliably from a >137G partition?

I've stopped screwing around with the usual eight or so partitions and
simply put everything in one honking large partition.[1] So far my
netbsd disk is only 80 Gigs and things are working well.  I wonder if
I could safely upgrade to a 200G disk set up the same way or if I
would start seeing bootstrap problems depending on where the blocks
needed for booting fell on the disk.

(What I've noticed is that some other BSD's failed outright when I
built 200G disks like this.  Something early on in the bootstrap


1 Actually one ffs partition and one swap partition following it.
  Having separate /, /var, /var/obj, /usr, /u, /v, /w, required
  periodic tar everything and repartition fests.  I finally decided
  that was an awful lot of relatively risky work for very little gain.