Hello.
I have a soekris net4801 embedded computer. This computer currently
runs OpenBSD 4.0. There are two internal drives on it: an enhanced
availability Hitachi Travelstar E7K100 (ready for 24/7 use) and a
SanDisk SDCFB-1024 CF card that is being used as installation media
and net4801 documentation and firmware releases repository:
comBIOS ver. 1.29 20070204 Copyright (C) 2000-2007 Soekris Engineering.
net4801
0256 Mbyte Memory CPU Geode 266 Mhz
Pri Mas HTE721080G9AT00 LBA 16383-16-63 78 Gbyte
Pri Sla SanDisk SDCFB-1024 LBA 1986-16-63 1001 Mbyte
Slot Vend Dev ClassRev Cmd Stat CL LT HT Base1 Base2 Int
-------------------------------------------------------------------
0:00:0 1078 0001 06000000 0107 0280 00 00 00 00000000 00000000
0:06:0 100B 0020 02000000 0107 0290 00 3F 00 0000E101 A0000000 10
0:07:0 100B 0020 02000000 0107 0290 00 3F 00 0000E201 A0001000 10
0:08:0 100B 0020 02000000 0107 0290 00 3F 00 0000E301 A0002000 10
0:10:0 104C AC23 06040002 0107 0210 08 3F 01 00000000 00000000
0:18:2 100B 0502 01018001 0005 0280 00 00 00 00000000 00000000
0:19:0 0E11 A0F8 0C031008 0117 0280 08 38 00 A0003000 00000000 11
1:00:0 100B 0020 02000000 0107 0290 00 3F 00 0000D001 A4000000 05
1:01:0 100B 0020 02000000 0107 0290 00 3F 00 0000D101 A4001000 11
5 Seconds to automatic boot. Press Ctrl-P for entering Monitor.
I would like to ask if this output for the "machine diskinfo" command
on the OpenBSD/i386 BOOT release 2.10 is expected:
Using drive 0, partition 3.
Loading...
probing: pc0 com0 com1 mem[639K 255M a20=on]
disk: hd0+ hd1+
>> OpenBSD/i386 BOOT 2.10
-
com0: 9600 baud
switching console to com0
>> OpenBSD/i386 BOOT 2.10
boot> machine diskinfo
Disk BIOS# Type Cyls Heads Secs Flags Checksum
hd0 0x80 label 1 16 63 0x2 0xd8299676
hd1 0x81 label 1 16 63 0x2 0xc99b9503
boot>
Drives on the soekris embedded computer are set as cable select.
On another computer, an old Pentium 166 MHz, there is a different
but annoying output too:
MBR on floppy or old BIOS
Using drive 0, partition 3.
Loading...
probing: pc0 com0 com1 mem[639K 127M a20=on]
disk: fd0 hd0+ hd1+
>> OpenBSD/i386 BOOT 2.10
boot> machine diskinfo
Disk BIOS# Type Cyls Heads Secs Flags Checksum
fd0 0x0 *none* 80 2 18 0x4 0x0
hd0 0x80 label 15 15 63 0x2 0xcbea9586
hd1 0x81 label 1019 16 63 0x2 0xc8d994f7
boot>
The first drive is a 6 GB Western Digital Caviar drive, the second
one is a 2 GB Western Digital Caviar drive.
The geometry for these internal HDDs is wrong too. Perhaps I am
missreading the output of this command as a consequence of how the
firmware on these computers sees the drives... (I know, a PC BIOS
and OpenBSD do not need to agree about HDD geometry) but... a single
cylinder on the net4801 (and 15 cylinders for the first internal HDD
on the pentium computer) cannot be right. These machines are running
OpenBSD only, no other operating systems are installed on them.
I have not find any useful reference to this problem on the operating
system documentation. Only the output of some "machine diskinfo"
commands that look right (on Google, most of them with an obvious
BIOS translation of the disk geometry) and a reference to "diskinfo"
on boot(8):
diskinfo Prints a list of hard disks installed on your system
including: BIOS device number, and the BIOS geometry.
Am I doing something wrong? It is not an important matter, OpenBSD
is working fine on these computers, but I would like to understand the
output of the diskinfo command on these machines. As both machines
return an incorrect disk geometry I start suspecting that I did
something wrong with relation to the disk drives.
Best regards,
Igor.
