DD (Dangerously Dedicated) mode not available

W

worldwins

I've run across this on quite a few installs and this time I want to nail the solution down:

I have a box I want to use in a render farm and I need only FreeBSD on it. On previous installs on other machines I noticed that the DD option is not available on the FDISK screen even though it describes it on the help (F1 screen). Why?

Now again I'm faced with the cursed error message "disk geometry does not match..." and I remember on other installs having to futz around with drive geometry settings till I was blue in the face to get the disk recognized. What am I missing here?
 
worldwins said:
I have a box I want to use in a render farm and I need only FreeBSD on it. On previous installs on other machines I noticed that the DD option is not available on the FDISK screen even though it describes it on the help (F1 screen). Why?
Click to expand...
It's really dangerous :e

Now again I'm faced with the cursed error message "disk geometry does not match..." and I remember on other installs having to futz around with drive geometry settings till I was blue in the face to get the disk recognized. What am I missing here?
Click to expand...
Just ignore the message and proceed.
 
DD returns?

When I installed FreeBSD8.0 RELEASE there were major issues with recognizing the drive. In the past I've made my drives DD as all my potential MS machines live in virtualbox. I was forced to use the 7.2 DVD to get a live system, as the 8.0 DVD somehow doesn't yield a functional live system.

Yet now running stable I am again able to mount some old DD hard drives I keep around for backup. I guess complaints caused a softening of the DD ban, though I don't track core development.
 
The problem is, when I proceed, I get the message "Unable to find device node for /dev/ad0s1b in /dev! The creation of filesystems will be aborted"
 
worldwins said:
The problem is, when I proceed, I get the message "Unable to find device node for /dev/ad0s1b in /dev! The creation of filesystems will be aborted"
Click to expand...

OK, I got the 7.3 distribution, which allows DD, and am installing it as we speak. So far, so good.

I don't know why DD is considered 'dangerous'. To who or what? If you have an old drive kicking around and want to use it as I've done, what harm could that do?
 
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