FreeBSD's sysinstall

This forum seems the most appropriate for my questions.

I have been trying to install FreeBSD 5.1 for the first time. I booted from the CD, and ran sysinstall. Everything went smoothly, I set up the partitions, etc.

Unfortunately, as soon as I got to the end, it aborted with an error somewhat like: 'device ad0s3b missing in /dev'.

After this abort I tried again, but had the same result. When I rebooted, the machine wouldn't boot anymore.

I found out that sysinstall had done some strange things, which I have questions about.

Firstly, about my partitions. I have a primary fat32 partition, 3000MB, then 2000MB unpartitioned, and the rest of the drive is an extended partition of 10000MB with a logical fat32 partition inside.

FreeBSD was to be installed into the 2000MB unpartitioned space. I created this partition in the install, selecting 'none' for the boot loader, as I want to boot FreeBSD from a DOS loader, similar to loadlin for Linux.

Anyway, the machine didn't boot. I found out the problem was 'Error #108: partition doesn't end on cylinder boundary' in Partition Magic'. My first question is how this error came about. Does this mean the drive's geometry was set wrong in sysinstall? I didn't change it, and the documentation says that the install can detect the drive's geometry easily if a dos partition already exists on it.

I also found that the new partition was set as the active partition, which doesn't make sense, because the partitioning program in sysinstall had an option to make the selected partion 'active', and I certainly didn't select it. Also, since it wasn't the first partition, and I elected to leave the MBR as it was, I don't see why it made the partition active. Is this behaviour simply undocumented?

Another thing that was peculiar was the way that FreeBSD chose the number the partitions. The first primary partition was numbered ad0s1, the extended was numbered ad0s2, and the new primary partition inserted between them became numbered ad0s3. Surely the partitions have a similar numbering scheme to linux, where the primaries are numbered in order first, then logical ones. Why was the order 1-3-2?

In the freebsd partition I marked the first 32MB as 'swap', and the rest as '/'. These became numbered ad0s3a and ad0s3b. Is there a problem with having the swap partition before the root partition?

I fixed the partition table without any problem, but now I am a bit stuck. Why was the device missing, any ideas how to get it to work specifically with the partitions as I am trying to configure them? Why was the partition table corrupted, when I simply created a new partition in unpartitioned space? Why was it set 'active', when it wasn't the first partition, and I selected no boot loader.

Finally, is there a better way to install without using sysinstall, or do most people use it? Can yuo give me any good advice to successfully install it? I am 99% sure I entered everything correctly.

I see now this wasn't the right forum for my previous post. It doesn't matter now, I seem to have worked it out.

The partitioning program detects the drive's geometry, but it actually needs the LBA-translated geometry instead. I wish they had said that. I still don't know why it makes the partition active, or why ad0s3 comes between number 1 and 2.

So I am sorted out, I even worked out how to use the Unix fdisk, which is quite horrendous btw.