Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop [solved]
On Thu, 6 Jan 2011 21:41:11 -0500, Chris Brennan wrote: On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 6:04 PM, Bruce Cran br...@cran.org.uk wrote: http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/ZFSBootPartition has a good guide for installing the base manually (you can ignore the gpart and zfs commands if you want). I found I had to copy the base and kernel directories from the install ISO to a UFS-formatted USB stick first though since the LiveFS CD doesn't have the distributions. -- Bruce Cran Bruce, your a lifesaver! +1 for you and your wiki page. +1 for Warren's page ( http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html#_the_old_standard_way_tt_fdisk_8_tt_and_tt_bsdlabel_8_tt) and +5 for Ian and his incredible patience. Hodgepodging Warren's and Bruce's pages together got me a working base. Laptop is now installed w/o the assistance of a boot cd or the usb hard-drive I was using. That's great news Chris, congratulations for perseverance. It could be argued that it shouldn't be this hard, but I don't need any argument .. I did have to grab a DVD of 8.1 and burn it to a DVDRW, just so I could get access to /dist/8.1-*. That being said, I think I am going to look at setting up that same external hd w/ a full 8.2-R root when it's ready, so I have a full, local tree to utilize for weird installs like this (I don't know why I never did that before) Excellent idea. Just for curiousity's sake, after all that what do you wind up with for: # fdisk -s ad4 # bsdlabel ad4s1 ?, Ian ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop [solved]
On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 9:58 AM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote: fdisk -s ad4 bsdlabel ad4s1 [r...@blackdragon /usr/src]# fdisk -s ad4; bsdlabel ad4s1 /dev/ad4: 1453521 cyl 16 hd 63 sec PartStartSize Type Flags 1: 63 1465149105 0xa5 0x80 # /dev/ad4s1: 8 partitions: #size offsetfstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg] a: 2097152 164.2BSD0 0 0 b: 16777216 2097168 swap c: 14651491050unused0 0 # raw part, don't edit d: 2097152 188743844.2BSD0 0 0 e: 20971520 209715364.2BSD0 0 0 f: 1423206049 419430564.2BSD0 0 0 [r...@blackdragon /usr/src]# ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Wed, 5 Jan 2011, Chris Brennan wrote:
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 12:44 AM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote:
Saw Chris' later message that -F isn't there for him, but here's what
should be, on the data, the sure-fire way to clobber that last sector:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 oseek=1465149167
which command SHOULD report just 512 bytes written (we're sure it can't
write past the end of the disk with no count specified), after which:
dd if=/dev/ad4 iseek=1465149167 | hd
SHOULD show zeroes from to 01ff (ie next block 0200)
If not, there really must be some hardware issue with writing?
Hopefully getting there!
Fixit# sysctrl kern.geom.debugflags=16
kern.geom.debugflags: 0 - 16
Fixit# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 oseek=1465149167
dd: /dev/ad4: end of device
2+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes transferred in 0.011 secs (51195 bytes/sec)
So that's right.
Fixit# dd if=/dev/ad4 iseek=1465149167 | hd
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
||
512 bytes transferred om 0.009863 secs (51912 bytes/sec)
*
0200
And that's right - the GPT secondary header is now gone.
restarting and back to sysinstall from BETA1 is nice dice ... same original
error ... can I just zero the whole drive?
Sure you can - but I'd be (happy to be) surprised at this point if it's
going to do much good. If nothing else it's a full surface write test,
and you could check afterwards that it's all been zeroed, hd showing
just a few lines (as above) over the whole disk (dd if=/dev/ad4 | hd)
We seem to have ruled out the remnants of a GPT problem, having Bruce
and Warren to thank for pointing it out; it's bound to catch others.
Your dd of the first 71 sectors looked right, MBR looks ok, sectors 1-62
are zeroes, boot1 and boot2 from sector 63-70 seem normal, after you
used 'W' to write anyway; can't say for sure that the bsdlabel is ok,
but see no reason to suppose otherwise. What says 'bsdlabel ad4s1'
while you've still got one?
Just be sure NOT to use the 'A' option for auto-partitioning again; I'm
sure I saw some problem with that on 8.1, not sure if it's fixed on 8.2
(Bruce?) so I suggest allocating the BSD partitioning you really want.
Failing that, I can't see other than a hardware issue, unless somehow
sysinstall is broken and you may do better manually running fdisk and
bsdlabel and newfs per Handbook and manuals? If that worked you could
still use sysinstall, skip fdisk and labelling steps and install the
distributions, ports tree, doc packages and other sysinstall goodies.
If it still persisted after that I'd subscribe and report the issue to
freebsd-stable in as much detail as needed for some more fresh eyes.
cheers, Ian
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Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Thu, 6 Jan 2011 20:06:42 +1100 (EST) Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote: Just be sure NOT to use the 'A' option for auto-partitioning again; I'm sure I saw some problem with that on 8.1, not sure if it's fixed on 8.2 (Bruce?) so I suggest allocating the BSD partitioning you really want. I've not fixed anything related to that. -- Bruce Cran ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 3:06 AM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote Your dd of the first 71 sectors looked right, MBR looks ok, sectors 1-62 are zeroes, boot1 and boot2 from sector 63-70 seem normal, after you used 'W' to write anyway; can't say for sure that the bsdlabel is ok, but see no reason to suppose otherwise. What says 'bsdlabel ad4s1' while you've still got one? This is a pretty easy problem to replicate if you are pressing W, and that issue has existed for quite some time. If you press W then Q at sysinstall fdisk then attempt to force write disklabel screens you will get the error. Just setup the slices and partitions as you want and let sysinstall handle the writing of information. There is a big warning box that says not to use force write except under certain conditions and this is not one of them. If you google the error message in the OP, the first result is: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1675 Failing that, I can't see other than a hardware issue, unless somehow sysinstall is broken and you may do better manually running fdisk and bsdlabel and newfs per Handbook and manuals? This doesn't say hardware error to me at all, at least not a disk hardware issue. The message was present across two disks, and if there truly is a problem writing to the media a complete zeroing of the drive would be apparent then. While we're getting people to look at sysinstall and the auto resizing, it would be nice to get the Unable to create the partition. Too big? issue resolved. You can trigger this by auto-sizing the partitions, deleting a couple and recreating one that a different size than one autosize suggested. Then create the second partion using the auto-populated value in partition size box. Typically run into this when making / a little bigger on amd64 installs by borrowing some space from /usr. It's very tedious to slowly decrease the size of the second partition in your attempts to create it if you're trying to utilize the whole drive. -- Adam Vande More ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Thu, 6 Jan 2011 09:11:55 +, Bruce Cran wrote: On Thu, 6 Jan 2011 20:06:42 +1100 (EST) Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote: Just be sure NOT to use the 'A' option for auto-partitioning again; I'm sure I saw some problem with that on 8.1, not sure if it's fixed on 8.2 (Bruce?) so I suggest allocating the BSD partitioning you really want. I've not fixed anything related to that. Oh, I must have dreamed it all; found nothing in local -stable archives, went hunting on sysinstall cvsweb but found anything there, don't know how to search svn yet; life's too short. Thanks for teaching some GPT. Sorry, Ian ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Thu, 6 Jan 2011, Adam Vande More wrote: On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 3:06 AM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote Your dd of the first 71 sectors looked right, MBR looks ok, sectors 1-62 are zeroes, boot1 and boot2 from sector 63-70 seem normal, after you used 'W' to write anyway; can't say for sure that the bsdlabel is ok, but see no reason to suppose otherwise. What says 'bsdlabel ad4s1' while you've still got one? This is a pretty easy problem to replicate if you are pressing W, and that issue has existed for quite some time. If you press W then Q at sysinstall fdisk then attempt to force write disklabel screens you will get the error. Just setup the slices and partitions as you want and let sysinstall handle the writing of information. There is a big warning box that says not to use force write except under certain conditions and this is not one of them. Adam, I think you may have missed a lot from the earlier messages in this thread. Admittedly it's long and likely tedious, but trying to help somebody get the OS installed is about as basic as it gets for me; I'd be hugely relieved if someone with more / better clues took it on. We didn't get to try W)rite from the fdisk and label screens until long after all attempts at letting sysinstall deal with things had failed to even slice the disk, bombing on this error every time. Chris' disk is brand new, nothing installed. W)riting from sysinstall succeeded at least in creating ad4s1 in the MBR and writing the bootblocks to that slice. I made it very clear this is not something to do without due care; in the circumstances there was absolutely nothing to be lost. And then the GPT issue, of which I was totally ignorant. Fixed. If you google the error message in the OP, the first result is: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1675 I can't see anything there that informs any solution to this issue, that doesn't cover everything Chris has tried. If you can, please elaborate? Failing that, I can't see other than a hardware issue, unless somehow sysinstall is broken and you may do better manually running fdisk and bsdlabel and newfs per Handbook and manuals? This doesn't say hardware error to me at all, at least not a disk hardware issue. The message was present across two disks, and if there truly is a problem writing to the media a complete zeroing of the drive would be apparent then. Chris has this issue with one disk only, so I'm not sure what you mean? If it's not hardware related (or HP firmware, as Mike suggested), maybe it is an issue with sysinstall. Manual fdisk bsdlabel newfs would confirm that or otherwise, but Chris will have to hunt up mans, docs and howtos on doing that himself, they're out there. On the other hand it's useful learning, and nothing he tries can make matters any worse. [ I can't comment on auto-allocated partitions, the last time I thought that was even vaguely a useful idea was my first install of 2.2.6 :^] If you have any spare magic dust to sprinkle on this, please do so. cheers, Ian ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 7:11 AM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote: Adam, I think you may have missed a lot from the earlier messages in this thread. Admittedly it's long and likely tedious, but trying to help somebody get the OS installed is about as basic as it gets for me; I'd be hugely relieved if someone with more / better clues took it on. Actually, I've been following every post since the thread's inception. Despite your listing of generally good advice, the most obvious cause theis error msg(of an admitted newbie) was not explicitly ruled out. I'm simply saying you should start there. Chris has this issue with one disk only, so I'm not sure what you mean? Earlier in the thread, the OP stated he tried to install on a Micro SD card and got the exact same result. -- Adam Vande More ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 1:32 PM, Adam Vande More amvandem...@gmail.comwrote: On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 7:11 AM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote: Adam, I think you may have missed a lot from the earlier messages in this thread. Admittedly it's long and likely tedious, but trying to help somebody get the OS installed is about as basic as it gets for me; I'd be hugely relieved if someone with more / better clues took it on. Actually, I've been following every post since the thread's inception. Despite your listing of generally good advice, the most obvious cause theis error msg(of an admitted newbie) was not explicitly ruled out. I'm simply saying you should start there. Chris has this issue with one disk only, so I'm not sure what you mean? Earlier in the thread, the OP stated he tried to install on a Micro SD card and got the exact same result. I see now the SD Card was not the install target, but regarding the the original point to OP was able to preform other normal operations on the card eg different FS. I don't really think the OP was pressing W initially which is why I didn't say anything earlier, just saying it's worth a check. -- Adam Vande More ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 1:51 PM, Adam Vande More amvandem...@gmail.comwrote: I see now the SD Card was not the install target, but regarding the the original point to OP was able to preform other normal operations on the card eg different FS. I don't really think the OP was pressing W initially which is why I didn't say anything earlier, just saying it's worth a check. There is also this issue here which looks to be quite similar. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=135040cat= You can try to upgrade your BIOS and reduced physical memory or use the suggested loader.conf setting(or boot prompt) -- Adam Vande More ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Fri, 7 Jan 2011, Ian Smith wrote: Manual fdisk bsdlabel newfs would confirm that or otherwise, but Chris will have to hunt up mans, docs and howtos on doing that himself, they're out there. Aha! http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html May/may not be helpful, but the price is right. Feedback welcome. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
GMail threadding don't fail me now! On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 4:54 AM, Adam Vande More amvandem...@gmail.comwrote: This is a pretty easy problem to replicate if you are pressing W, and that issue has existed for quite some time. If you press W then Q at sysinstall fdisk then attempt to force write disklabel screens you will get the error. Just setup the slices and partitions as you want and let sysinstall handle the writing of information. There is a big warning box that says not to use force write except under certain conditions and this is not one of them. If you google the error message in the OP, the first result is: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1675 pressing 'W' was a last resort option, by no means was I starting off that way. Failing that, I can't see other than a hardware issue, unless somehow sysinstall is broken and you may do better manually running fdisk and bsdlabel and newfs per Handbook and manuals? This doesn't say hardware error to me at all, at least not a disk hardware issue. The message was present across two disks, and if there truly is a problem writing to the media a complete zeroing of the drive would be apparent then. No, only one disk. While we're getting people to look at sysinstall and the auto resizing, it would be nice to get the Unable to create the partition. Too big? issue resolved. You can trigger this by auto-sizing the partitions, deleting a couple and recreating one that a different size than one autosize suggested. Then create the second partion using the auto-populated value in partition size box. Typically run into this when making / a little bigger on amd64 installs by borrowing some space from /usr. It's very tedious to slowly decrease the size of the second partition in your attempts to create it if you're trying to utilize the whole drive. -- Adam Vande More ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 8:11 AM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote: Adam, I think you may have missed a lot from the earlier messages in this thread. Admittedly it's long and likely tedious, but trying to help somebody get the OS installed is about as basic as it gets for me; I'd be hugely relieved if someone with more / better clues took it on. We didn't get to try W)rite from the fdisk and label screens until long after all attempts at letting sysinstall deal with things had failed to even slice the disk, bombing on this error every time. Chris' disk is brand new, nothing installed. W)riting from sysinstall succeeded at least in creating ad4s1 in the MBR and writing the bootblocks to that slice. I made it very clear this is not something to do without due care; in the circumstances there was absolutely nothing to be lost. And then the GPT issue, of which I was totally ignorant. Fixed. I agree, you seem to be lumping me into a generalization based on the errormsg. If you google the error message in the OP, the first result is: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1675 I read this, while that PR Reporter claims the same error message, the conditions in which s/he gets it _are not_ the same conditions in which I am getting this. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 2:32 PM, Adam Vande More amvandem...@gmail.comwrote: On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 7:11 AM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote: Adam, I think you may have missed a lot from the earlier messages in this thread. Admittedly it's long and likely tedious, but trying to help somebody get the OS installed is about as basic as it gets for me; I'd be hugely relieved if someone with more / better clues took it on. Actually, I've been following every post since the thread's inception. Despite your listing of generally good advice, the most obvious cause theis error msg(of an admitted newbie) was not explicitly ruled out. I'm simply saying you should start there. ... Chris has this issue with one disk only, so I'm not sure what you mean? Earlier in the thread, the OP stated he tried to install on a Micro SD card and got the exact same result. Ney, I was having general issues w/ my card-reader and slow write speeds, that has been solved. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
If you google the error message in the OP, the first result is: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1675 I read this, while that PR Reporter claims the same error message, the conditions in which s/he gets it _are not_ the same conditions in which I am getting this. Thread poster* sorry for that one ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Warren Block wbl...@wonkity.com wrote: On Fri, 7 Jan 2011, Ian Smith wrote: Manual fdisk bsdlabel newfs would confirm that or otherwise, but Chris will have to hunt up mans, docs and howtos on doing that himself, they're out there. Aha! http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.htmlhttp://www.wonkity.com/%7Ewblock/docs/html/disksetup.html May/may not be helpful, but the price is right. Feedback welcome. Can I bow at your feet?!? This gave me just enough of a clue to go back and arbitraility pass 'gpart delete -i 1 ad4' which actually deleted a partition! I then zeroed the first 73 and the last 33 blocks of the drive. fdisk still complained about 'Class not found' which I googled and found to be an artifact of gpart(8). So my question is this now, once gpart has touched a disk, does it have the partition-aids now? Moving on, I then continued the standard process listed by your link, bsdlabel'd my layout and saved it, when I do an 'ls -lsga /dev | grep ad4' I see that I have partitions a,b,d,e,f and I was able to newfs each one of them Next question, from this point (at the fixit prompt) can I preform a manual install of just base? if I can get the system installed at this point then all should be good when I reboot. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Thu, 6 Jan 2011 17:54:32 -0500 Chris Brennan xa...@xaerolimit.net wrote: Next question, from this point (at the fixit prompt) can I preform a manual install of just base? if I can get the system installed at this point then all should be good when I reboot. http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/ZFSBootPartition has a good guide for installing the base manually (you can ignore the gpart and zfs commands if you want). I found I had to copy the base and kernel directories from the install ISO to a UFS-formatted USB stick first though since the LiveFS CD doesn't have the distributions. -- Bruce Cran ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop [solved]
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 6:04 PM, Bruce Cran br...@cran.org.uk wrote: http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/ZFSBootPartition has a good guide for installing the base manually (you can ignore the gpart and zfs commands if you want). I found I had to copy the base and kernel directories from the install ISO to a UFS-formatted USB stick first though since the LiveFS CD doesn't have the distributions. -- Bruce Cran Bruce, your a lifesaver! +1 for you and your wiki page. +1 for Warren's page ( http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html#_the_old_standard_way_tt_fdisk_8_tt_and_tt_bsdlabel_8_tt) and +5 for Ian and his incredible patience. Hodgepodging Warren's and Bruce's pages together got me a working base. Laptop is now installed w/o the assistance of a boot cd or the usb hard-drive I was using. I did have to grab a DVD of 8.1 and burn it to a DVDRW, just so I could get access to /dist/8.1-*. That being said, I think I am going to look at setting up that same external hd w/ a full 8.2-R root when it's ready, so I have a full, local tree to utilize for weird installs like this (I don't know why I never did that before) ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Thu, 6 Jan 2011, Chris Brennan wrote: On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Warren Block wbl...@wonkity.com wrote: On Fri, 7 Jan 2011, Ian Smith wrote: Manual fdisk bsdlabel newfs would confirm that or otherwise, but Chris will have to hunt up mans, docs and howtos on doing that himself, they're out there. Aha! http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html May/may not be helpful, but the price is right. Feedback welcome. Can I bow at your feet?!? This gave me just enough of a clue to go back and arbitraility pass 'gpart delete -i 1 ad4' which actually deleted a partition! I then zeroed the first 73 and the last 33 blocks of the drive. fdisk still complained about 'Class not found' which I googled and found to be an artifact of gpart(8). destroy -F is supposed to mean Forced destroying of the partition table even if it is not empty. But compare to this thread on the forum earlier today: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=20731 Maybe -F isn't quite as brutal as it needs to be. So my question is this now, once gpart has touched a disk, does it have the partition-aids now? GPT does seem to be tenacious, and I'm wondering if maybe there's something left in RAM that's written back to the disk on shutdown. Moving on, I then continued the standard process listed by your link, bsdlabel'd my layout and saved it, when I do an 'ls -lsga /dev | grep ad4' I see that I have partitions a,b,d,e,f and I was able to newfs each one of them Next question, from this point (at the fixit prompt) can I preform a manual install of just base? if I can get the system installed at this point then all should be good when I reboot. I would just boot the install CD, enter q and the fdisk screen, enter the mountpoints and q at the label screen, and let it do the rest.___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 11:48 PM, Warren Block wbl...@wonkity.com wrote: destroy -F is supposed to mean Forced destroying of the partition table even if it is not empty. But compare to this thread on the forum earlier today: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=20731 Maybe -F isn't quite as brutal as it needs to be. I still can't find any documentation on this in the manpages? HA! I just finished skimming the above thread, -F is indeed new and not in 8.1. I am going to set up a local mirror of 7.x, 8.x and HEAD over the next week and if I remember, I'll be sure to check it out and see if it does infact exist in 8.2. So my question is this now, once gpart has touched a disk, does it have the partition-aids now? GPT does seem to be tenacious, and I'm wondering if maybe there's something left in RAM that's written back to the disk on shutdown. Sneaky ... but possibly not likely since I more then once pulled the plug and didn't give it time to actually write anything. Either way, between your link and Bruce's, all is well. Moving on, I then continued the standard process listed by your link, bsdlabel'd my layout and saved it, when I do an 'ls -lsga /dev | grep ad4' I see that I have partitions a,b,d,e,f and I was able to newfs each one of them Next question, from this point (at the fixit prompt) can I preform a manual install of just base? if I can get the system installed at this point then all should be good when I reboot. I would just boot the install CD, enter q and the fdisk screen, enter the mountpoints and q at the label screen, and let it do the rest. See, I did that the first time and it all came to a screaming halt. That's when I started to get creative with Ian. I'm going to take a stab in the dark and blame Seagate for kludging the disk on me. Either way, a manual fdisk and bsdlabel did the trick, it's got to be something in sysinstall not liking what ever was written there by gpart... ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 12:44 AM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote: Saw Chris' later message that -F isn't there for him, but here's what should be, on the data, the sure-fire way to clobber that last sector: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 oseek=1465149167 which command SHOULD report just 512 bytes written (we're sure it can't write past the end of the disk with no count specified), after which: dd if=/dev/ad4 iseek=1465149167 | hd SHOULD show zeroes from to 01ff (ie next block 0200) If not, there really must be some hardware issue with writing? Hopefully getting there! cheers, Ian [..] Fixit# sysctrl kern.geom.debugflags=16 kern.geom.debugflags: 0 - 16 Fixit# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 oseek=1465149167 dd: /dev/ad4: end of device 2+0 records in 1+0 records out 512 bytes transferred in 0.011 secs (51195 bytes/sec) Fixit# dd if=/dev/ad4 iseek=1465149167 | hd 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 || 512 bytes transferred om 0.009863 secs (51912 bytes/sec) * 0200 Fixit# [..] restarting and back to sysinstall from BETA1 is nice dice ... same original error ... can I just zero the whole drive? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Mon, 3 Jan 2011 16:31:17 -0500, Chris Brennan wrote: [.. trimming ccs, selectively quoting and de-gmailing a bit ..] On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 1:39 AM, Michael Powell nightre...@hotmail.com wrote: No. I used the of=/dev/ad4 as described above. However, I think you've hit the nail on the head on one aspect. I believe that 6.2 disk was originally set up as dangerously dedicated. It was so long ago and I had forgotten all about it, but this does dovetail with what your are getting at. That may be so for you, but nothing less then FreeBSD8.1 or a Gentoo LiveCD has touched this drive. Gentoo only yo prove to myself that a sucessful ext4 filesystem could be created. GPT/GEOM wasn't used, I used all standard disk-creation methods as described in the gentoo handbook. I also used Gentoo's gpart utilities to independatly verify that any artifacts of GPT/GEOM were removed (which they were). Ok. It may still be useful to see what if anything remains in the areas that GPT uses .. see below. was attempting to do a fresh 'minimal' install of 8.0-Release to the old 6.2 disk pulled off a shelf prior to doing restore(s) of a dump from just the day before. It was only done because it could be done immediately, and a newer, larger, better replacement procured after the fact. This is actually something I fear in reinstalling my other FreeBSD system, which is currently 7.3, which has been upgraded successfully from 6.1. But ports has gotten out of hand and I'm rather tired of trying to fix each port, one at a time when there are prolly hundreds currently installed. For sure. I'm going to wait till 7.4-RELEASE, then reinstall all of the ports on my now 7.4-PRERELEASE system from the set of ports (and esp. packages) resulting from the ports freeze .. that way there's much less chance of inconsistencies and mangled dependencies that often occur when trying to upgrade a lot of ports/packages installed some time ago .. Exact copy of error from my notes here: Unable to find device node for /dev/ad4s1b in /dev! The creation of filesystems will be aborted. Then pressing OK brings this: Couldn't make filesystems properly. Aborting. Yes, this is exactly the same error I get. While that is the same, I think there is an underlying issue here that is causing my issue that doesn't exactly pertain to 'dangerously dedicated'. Sure. This from sysinstall and occurs after fdisk, labeling, at the point when sysinstall then tries to write out the config to the disk and newfs. Yerp, sysinstalls pukes at newfs/swap creation, when it can't find /dev/ad4s1b (which is swap) Or any other form of 'garbage'. I'd use the 8.1 LiveFS CD myself just as a personal preference - but either approach should do the job. Well, the garbage I reported was because of a typo on my part. Yes - I agree. Would also be nice to examine it afterward with a hex editor to actually see *if* all writes were zero. Any 'ones' sprinkled in there, especially in the region of the disk we are talking about would indicate corruption. And my wild guess if this is the situation it may possibly indicate some form of subtle hardware incompatibility most likely a clash of firmwares, e.g. controller and disk(s). Some form of non-standard controller implementation, especially wrt to its firmware being buggy. If someone provides the command for this, I will happily run it and see if the output is all zero's... Ok, let's eg look at the first and last 'tracks' of 63 sectors. If you have somewhere you can copy these to (like a USB stick) then you can do that and examine them on another box with hexdump(1) | less(1). If not, as they're expected to be mostly zeroes, you can do it directly: dd if=/dev/ad4 count=71 | hd | less Not sure if Fixit provides hd /or less, though they appear in /usr/bin? That shows you the boot sector ie MBR, plus anything in sectors 1-62, plus the first 4KB of what will be ad4s1, ie the s1 boot blocks (if they've been ever written there yet and haven't been since cleared) According to your earlier report, your disk has: cylinders=1453521 heads=16 sectors/tracks=63 (1008 blks/cyl) and using that (standard) geometry, reformatted a bit: Offset Size(ST) End Name PTypeDescSubtype Flags 0 6362 -12 unused 0 63 14651491051465149167ad4s18freebsd165 Check: 1453521 * 16 * 63 = 1465149168 sectors, numbered 0..1465149167 So since iseek=0 starts at sector 0, then iseek=1465149167 starts at the last sector, right? So: dd if=/dev/ad4 iseek=1465149104 count=63 | hd shows the last 63 sectors (last track) of the drive. If this isn't all zeroes (which is worth knowing, and recording) then make it so with: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 oseek=1465149104 count=63 which is ok for your blank
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 3:56 AM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote: On Mon, 3 Jan 2011 16:31:17 -0500, Chris Brennan wrote: [.. trimming ccs, selectively quoting and de-gmailing a bit ..] Trimmings! Oh nevermind. I don't know what possessed me to go and look at the debug window. But I do and I see the following. GEOM: ad4: the primary GPT table is corrupt or invalid. GEOM: ad4: using the secondary instead -- recovery strongly advised. This is even after zero the beginning and the end of the drive Something is hinky! ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Tue, 4 Jan 2011, Chris Brennan wrote: On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 3:56 AM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote: On Mon, 3 Jan 2011 16:31:17 -0500, Chris Brennan wrote: [.. trimming ccs, selectively quoting and de-gmailing a bit ..] Trimmings! Oh nevermind. I don't know what possessed me to go and look at the debug window. But I do and I see the following. GEOM: ad4: the primary GPT table is corrupt or invalid. GEOM: ad4: using the secondary instead -- recovery strongly advised. This is even after zero the beginning and the end of the drive Something is hinky! Today I also found that zeroing the beginning and end of the drive didn't seem to be enough. I had the start of a huffy email about how hard it was to calculate the end of a drive in blocks, and how dd didn't have a negative oseek to seek backwards from the end. But then I checked gpart(8)... and it turns out that # gpart destroy -F da0 works. Be very careful that you've got the right drive there, of course. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 8:44 PM, Warren Block wbl...@wonkity.com wrote: On Tue, 4 Jan 2011, Chris Brennan wrote: On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 3:56 AM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote: On Mon, 3 Jan 2011 16:31:17 -0500, Chris Brennan wrote: [.. trimming ccs, selectively quoting and de-gmailing a bit ..] Trimmings! Oh nevermind. I don't know what possessed me to go and look at the debug window. But I do and I see the following. GEOM: ad4: the primary GPT table is corrupt or invalid. GEOM: ad4: using the secondary instead -- recovery strongly advised. This is even after zero the beginning and the end of the drive Something is hinky! Today I also found that zeroing the beginning and end of the drive didn't seem to be enough. I had the start of a huffy email about how hard it was to calculate the end of a drive in blocks, and how dd didn't have a negative oseek to seek backwards from the end. But then I checked gpart(8)... and it turns out that # gpart destroy -F da0 works. Be very careful that you've got the right drive there, of course. Fixit# gpart destroy -F /dev/node# says gpart: illegal option -- F it would appear that the gpart on the 8.1-RELEASE and 8.2BETA1 images do not contain this switch and I get pattern not found when I search 'man 8 gpart' ... there is a '-f flags' but no mention of '-F' C- ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Tue, 4 Jan 2011, Warren Block wrote: On Tue, 4 Jan 2011, Chris Brennan wrote: On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 3:56 AM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote: On Mon, 3 Jan 2011 16:31:17 -0500, Chris Brennan wrote: [.. trimming ccs, selectively quoting and de-gmailing a bit ..] Trimmings! Oh nevermind. I don't know what possessed me to go and look at the debug window. But I do and I see the following. GEOM: ad4: the primary GPT table is corrupt or invalid. GEOM: ad4: using the secondary instead -- recovery strongly advised. This is even after zero the beginning and the end of the drive Something is hinky! Indeed. Well Chris attached the following to his prior email, which made it to the list being text, dmesg didn't, application/octet-stream: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20110104/c370dd77/dmesg-0001.obj But confirming the GEOM messages shown above, here's the 'smoking gun': 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 || * 4000 45 46 49 20 50 41 52 54 00 00 01 00 5c 00 00 00 |EFI PART\...| 4010 2b b3 b7 fa 00 00 00 00 ef 66 54 57 00 00 00 00 |+fTW| 4020 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 22 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |...| 4030 ce 66 54 57 00 00 00 00 45 51 13 4c 0e 0e e0 11 |.fTWEQ.L| 4040 95 6e 00 1d 72 5b f5 d6 cf 66 54 57 00 00 00 00 |.n..r[...fTW| 4050 80 00 00 00 80 00 00 00 86 d2 54 ab 00 00 00 00 |..T.| 4060 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 || * 4200 So that is really the last 33 sectors of the disk (0x4200 = 16896d, / 512 = 33) and the last sector does indeed have the 'GPT EFI' signature (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table), so the seek and count looks right, matching the read command I'd suggested: dd if=/dev/ad4 iseek=1465149135 count=33 | hd Seems odd that it hasn't been zeroed, but all the sectors before it are (ie there's just the header, no actual 128-byte partition entries if I'm interpreting this correctly), so maybe there's still some off-by-one in counting from the end of the disk for writing, not knowing the actual dd command used .. you're not wrong that negative offsets can be tricky! Today I also found that zeroing the beginning and end of the drive didn't seem to be enough. I had the start of a huffy email about how hard it was to calculate the end of a drive in blocks, and how dd didn't have a negative oseek to seek backwards from the end. But then I checked gpart(8)... and it turns out that # gpart destroy -F da0 works. Be very careful that you've got the right drive there, of course. Saw Chris' later message that -F isn't there for him, but here's what should be, on the data, the sure-fire way to clobber that last sector: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 oseek=1465149167 which command SHOULD report just 512 bytes written (we're sure it can't write past the end of the disk with no count specified), after which: dd if=/dev/ad4 iseek=1465149167 | hd SHOULD show zeroes from to 01ff (ie next block 0200) If not, there really must be some hardware issue with writing? Hopefully getting there! cheers, Ian ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
I was not around the computer yesterday to reply to these in a timely matter and replying to each one just got confusing since gmail appends all of my replies to the bottom of the thread and not after the person I replied to. I got the reply header to each person and went that route | Reply header, who said what. | Their reply | | My Reply On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 1:39 AM, Michael Powell nightre...@hotmail.com wrote: No. I used the of=/dev/ad4 as described above. However, I think you've hit the nail on the head on one aspect. I believe that 6.2 disk was originally set up as dangerously dedicated. It was so long ago and I had forgotten all about it, but this does dovetail with what your are getting at. That may be so for you, but nothing less then FreeBSD8.1 or a Gentoo LiveCD has touched this drive. Gentoo only yo prove to myself that a sucessful ext4 filesystem could be created. GPT/GEOM wasn't used, I used all standard disk-creation methods as described in the gentoo handbook. I also used Gentoo's gpart utilities to independatly verify that any artifacts of GPT/GEOM were removed (which they were). The machine that disk went into had been upgraded completely through the 7.x series and on to 8.0-Release before it's disk went up in smoke(literally). I was attempting to do a fresh 'minimal' install of 8.0-Release to the old 6.2 disk pulled off a shelf prior to doing restore(s) of a dump from just the day before. It was only done because it could be done immediately, and a newer, larger, better replacement procured after the fact. This is actually something I fear in reinstalling my other FreeBSD system, which is currently 7.3, which has been upgraded successfully from 6.1. But ports has gotten out of hand and I'm rather tired of trying to fix each port, one at a time when there are prolly hundreds currently installed. Exact copy of error from my notes here: Unable to find device node for /dev/ad4s1b in /dev! The creation of filesystems will be aborted. Then pressing OK brings this: Couldn't make filesystems properly. Aborting. Yes, this is exactly the same error I get. While that is the same, I think there is an underlying issue here that is causing my issue that doesn't exactly pertain to 'dangerously dedicated'. This from sysinstall and occurs after fdisk, labeling, at the point when sysinstall then tries to write out the config to the disk and newfs. Yerp, sysinstalls pukes at newfs/swap creation, when it can't find /dev/ad4s1b (which is swap) Or any other form of 'garbage'. I'd use the 8.1 LiveFS CD myself just as a personal preference - but either approach should do the job. Well, the garbage I reported was because of a typo on my part. Yes - I agree. Would also be nice to examine it afterward with a hex editor to actually see *if* all writes were zero. Any 'ones' sprinkled in there, especially in the region of the disk we are talking about would indicate corruption. And my wild guess if this is the situation it may possibly indicate some form of subtle hardware incompatibility most likely a clash of firmwares, e.g. controller and disk(s). Some form of non-standard controller implementation, especially wrt to its firmware being buggy. If someone provides the command for this, I will happily run it and see if the output is all zero's... In the OEM world of the likes of HP, DELL, etc, when this happens a lot of times they kludge together a work around driver that you can get from their tech support. It masks the hardware/firmware problem in software, and is almost always a Windows-centric thing. *shudder* that's all, just *shudder* Bad thing here is the old: but it worked in 7.x, only fails with 8.x Whenever I see _that_ I think developer involvement/smarter people than me required Well, the irony here, the failing drive is *ALSO* 8.1, I can slap that back in and fire it up, it still boots and works, I just didn't want to take the risk of the drive's cheese sliding off it's cracker. I use knode and gmane. I also know that (IIRC) you're supposed to reply by email and CC: the list. There is a set of configs which allow one to configure knode to do just this, however, the last two times I've tried it knode crashed horribly. That was a couple of small revisions of KDE ago, so I should soon revisit this myself and see if the bug has ever gotten any love. GMail's (Google for Domains) threadding is a bit awkwards to get used to at first but works out rather nicely once you get used to it. On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 2:19 AM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote: On /dev/ad4, oseek=0 zeroes sector 0, the MBR including DOS partition (FreeBSD slice) table, so that would kill all the slice data, so sure, ad4s1 won't exist. oseek=1 just zeroes an unused sector as we've seen. What you _can_ do from that state is: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 oseek=63 count=8 which will remove the first 4K of (what will be) slice 1, in case there's a
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Sun, 02 Jan 2011 01:39:13 -0500 Michael Powell nightre...@hotmail.com wrote: Unable to find device node for /dev/ad4s1b in /dev! The creation of filesystems will be aborted. Then pressing OK brings this: Couldn't make filesystems properly. Aborting. This from sysinstall and occurs after fdisk, labeling, at the point when sysinstall then tries to write out the config to the disk and newfs. This can happen if you've had it partitioned using GPT at some point - in that case you need to use dd to zero the first _and_ last sectors of the disk. -- Bruce Cran ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 01:13:57 -0500 Chris Brennan xa...@xaerolimit.net wrote: No worries on missing it, I'm not sure that helped, I farted around with it again earlier today with little more in the way of success. What I tried was to just set up '/' and swamp and it still prompted me about not being able to find /dev/ad4s1b. See my post later in the thread: this most likely has nothing to do with the partition layout but the fact that FreeBSD is finding an old partition scheme. -- Bruce Cran ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Sun, 2 Jan 2011 10:22:55 +, Bruce Cran wrote: On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 01:13:57 -0500 Chris Brennan xa...@xaerolimit.net wrote: No worries on missing it, I'm not sure that helped, I farted around with it again earlier today with little more in the way of success. What I tried was to just set up '/' and swamp and it still prompted me about not being able to find /dev/ad4s1b. See my post later in the thread: this most likely has nothing to do with the partition layout but the fact that FreeBSD is finding an old partition scheme. Even dodgier than waiting to quote a message from a digest that hasn't arrived yet is hand-indenting a paste from pipermail :) but I'll hang this off your thread, thanks Bruce .. On Sun, 02 Jan 2011 01:39:13 -0500 Michael Powell nightrecon at hotmail.com wrote: Unable to find device node for /dev/ad4s1b in /dev! The creation of filesystems will be aborted. Then pressing OK brings this: Couldn't make filesystems properly. Aborting. This from sysinstall and occurs after fdisk, labeling, at the point when sysinstall then tries to write out the config to the disk and newfs. This can happen if you've had it partitioned using GPT at some point - in that case you need to use dd to zero the first _and_ last sectors of the disk. Although it's a brand new disk, quoting Chris' original message after skipping the shutdown when too hot issue: gonna let it cool down and try the smart tests again. Incidentally, I was able to boot a gentoo disc and set up an ext4 filesystem on the same disk and it worked fine, so I don't understand why freebsd can't preform a newfs on the drive. Hmm, should we bet against a gentoo install using GPT these days? Finding out about the actual disk layout in gpt(8), gpart(8) etc proving fruitless and finding nothing in Handbook, FAQ or wiki, I resorted to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table for hopefully correct information. I hadn't even known that sectors 1-33 were used for the GPT (making Mike's zeroing of sector 1 sensible even on sliced disks), nor that the last 33 sectors were for its backup table, thanks. So: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da4 skip=N where N is the known total number of sectors minus 34, should do it? If not, we can't rule out Mike's concerns about BIOS incompatibility or such, but this sure sounds like the next thing Chris should try. cheers, Ian ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Mon, 3 Jan 2011, Ian Smith wrote: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da4 skip=N where N is the known total number of sectors minus 34, should do it? Argh .. that should be seek=N, not skip. Up way too late .. cheers, Ian ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
Yes - true enough. Was thinking partition table and typed 'mbr'. It's all good, I got the cmd right in the end, but alas, it helped me not! Mmm .. it's not clear from Chris' original message exactly what he did. I clarified that in a subsequent reply with considerably more detail :D In my case, a temporary replacement disk had FreeBSD 6.2 on it. Something changed wrt to disklabeling on the way to 8-Release and the old 6.2 being present created a situation where that region on the disk was invisible to the new labeling and wouldn't write out. A new install of 8-Release (sysinstall) would error out with the same message as Chris when it came to the point of writing out to the disk. For me, the above 2 commands fixed my situation. Even though his error is the same, I think his problem may be different from mine. -Mike I have a 2GB MicroSD card that I am going to toss 8.2BETA1 on, hopefully later today and see where that gets me. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
In freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 343, Issue 10, Message: 23 On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 19:37:10 -0500 Michael Powell nightre...@hotmail.com wrote: Ian Smith wrote: In freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 343, Issue 5, Message: 10 On Tue, 28 Dec 2010 11:02:45 -0500 Chris Brennan xa...@xaerolimit.net wrote: On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 2:23 AM, Michael Powell nightre...@hotmail.comwrote: Try zeroing out the mbr: Boot a LiveFS CD, then at a root prompt do: sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 and: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adx oseek=1 bs=512 count=1 where x equals your drive number. This will zero out any old MBR. Er, no, Mike. The MBR is in sector 0 of the disk; that would zero out sector 1 as oseek=1 skips over sector 0. What's in sector 1 depends on how/whether the disk is sliced. In a 'dangerously dedicated' (unsliced) disk like a memory stick perhaps, this would usually be /boot/boot1 and include the bsdlabel. In a sliced disk, sectors 1 to 62 are typically unused, the first slice usually starting at sector 63. t23% fdisk -s ad0 /dev/ad0: 232581 cyl 16 hd 63 sec PartStartSize Type Flags 1: 63 8385867 0x0b 0x00 2: 8385930 125821080 0xa5 0x80 3: 13420701033543342 0xa5 0x00 4: 16775073066685815 0xa5 0x00 If you really want to zero out sector 0, leave out the oseek (or use oseek=0) - but you're better off using 'fdisk -Bi' to init a new disk. Yes - true enough. Was thinking partition table and typed 'mbr'. Well, what's commonly called 'the partition table' is bytes 0x1be-1ff of the MBR, so I was confused by your writing to sector 1 rather than 0, but have a new theory to test, seeing Chris isn't making any progress; this maybe a victim of the old 'slice vs partition' terminology issue. In my case, a temporary replacement disk had FreeBSD 6.2 on it. Something changed wrt to disklabeling on the way to 8-Release and the old 6.2 being present created a situation where that region on the disk was invisible to the new labeling and wouldn't write out. A new install of 8-Release (sysinstall) would error out with the same message as Chris when it came to the point of writing out to the disk. For me, the above 2 commands fixed my situation. Even though his error is the same, I think his problem may be different from mine. The bsdlabel lives in sector 1 (counting from 0) of the slice concerned, specifically the first 0x114 (276d) bytes, in the second sector of the boot blocks. As noted above, in unsliced disks such as memstick.img that's sector 1 of the entire disk, but in ordinary sliced disks it's in sector 1 of the _slice_, so if you'd used (here using Chris' ad4) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4s1 oseek=1 bs=512 count=1 - rather than of=/dev/ad4 - then you would indeed be zeroing out the label, ie the 'partition table' in FreeBSD-speak. Is that perhaps what you had to do to that 6.2 disk, which I suppose was a sliced disk? At 6.x (and 7.x, I think) it could have been 'dangerously dedicated' ie unsliced .. which option has been removed in 8.x _except_ regarding the memstick.img (appearing as /dev/daXa) .. not half confusing, eh? In any case, it'd be a cheap trick for Chris to try from Fixit, and though it seems unlikely there'd be anything 'leftover' from an earlier install, maybe earlier failure/s have left a broken bsdlabel there? So at this still-uninstalled stage it couldn't hurt to zero that sector, or even the first 4KB of ad4s1 .. which is /boot/boot1 plus /boot/boot2 (which equals /boot/boot !) before the label section gets written. ie: sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4s1 bs=512 count=8 will remove slice 1's boot blocks entirely, including the bsdlabel. cheers, Ian [excuse broken threading, but unless cc'd I have to reply to the digest] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 11:25 AM, Chris Brennan xa...@xaerolimit.net wrote: I have a 2GB MicroSD card that I am going to toss 8.2BETA1 on, hopefully later today and see where that gets me. 2GB MicroSD card was a bust, use a 60GB hard-drive and wrote the image to that, it booted it just fine, but the install failed w/ the exact same error. Could this be the new drive? *shudder* Defective in some way? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 10:20 PM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote: Well, what's commonly called 'the partition table' is bytes 0x1be-1ff of the MBR, so I was confused by your writing to sector 1 rather than 0, but have a new theory to test, seeing Chris isn't making any progress; this maybe a victim of the old 'slice vs partition' terminology issue. I think I was able to figure this part out, his meaning at least. The bsdlabel lives in sector 1 (counting from 0) of the slice concerned, specifically the first 0x114 (276d) bytes, in the second sector of the boot blocks. As noted above, in unsliced disks such as memstick.img that's sector 1 of the entire disk, but in ordinary sliced disks it's in sector 1 of the _slice_, so if you'd used (here using Chris' ad4) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4s1 oseek=1 bs=512 count=1 I would happily run this, but ad4s1 doesn't exist, and hasn't (that I know of), I did do oseek=0 and oseek=1 on /dev/ad4 tho and that didn't change anything, it still says it can't find /dev/ad4s1b (swap obviously) - rather than of=/dev/ad4 - then you would indeed be zeroing out the label, ie the 'partition table' in FreeBSD-speak. Is that perhaps what you had to do to that 6.2 disk, which I suppose was a sliced disk? At 6.x (and 7.x, I think) it could have been 'dangerously dedicated' ie unsliced .. which option has been removed in 8.x _except_ regarding the memstick.img (appearing as /dev/daXa) .. not half confusing, eh? I actually noticed this today, I had issues writing 8.2BETA1 to a 2GB MicroSD card, so I used a 2.5 external hard-drive and from the fixit prompt I noticed that it wrote a 1gb partition for the BETA1 image and left the rest of the desk untouched (ann 59gb of it). In any case, it'd be a cheap trick for Chris to try from Fixit, and though it seems unlikely there'd be anything 'leftover' from an earlier install, maybe earlier failure/s have left a broken bsdlabel there? So at this still-uninstalled stage it couldn't hurt to zero that sector, or even the first 4KB of ad4s1 .. which is /boot/boot1 plus /boot/boot2 (which equals /boot/boot !) before the label section gets written. ie: sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4s1 bs=512 count=8 will remove slice 1's boot blocks entirely, including the bsdlabel. cheers, Ian [excuse broken threading, but unless cc'd I have to reply to the digest] I've been trying to keep you in my replies but your down-under, so I don't get your replies till after 1am my time... Anywho, it's late and I need to be up in 8hrs, hopefully this can be figured out ... I would hate for the disk to be defective in some way. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
Ian Smith wrote: In freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 343, Issue 10, Message: 23 On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 19:37:10 -0500 Michael Powell nightre...@hotmail.com wrote: [snip] Try zeroing out the mbr: Boot a LiveFS CD, then at a root prompt do: sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 and: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adx oseek=1 bs=512 count=1 where x equals your drive number. This will zero out any old MBR. Er, no, Mike. The MBR is in sector 0 of the disk; that would zero out sector 1 as oseek=1 skips over sector 0. What's in sector 1 depends on how/whether the disk is sliced. In a 'dangerously dedicated' (unsliced) disk like a memory stick perhaps, this would usually be /boot/boot1 and include the bsdlabel. In a sliced disk, sectors 1 to 62 are typically unused, the first slice usually starting at sector 63. t23% fdisk -s ad0 /dev/ad0: 232581 cyl 16 hd 63 sec PartStartSize Type Flags 1: 63 8385867 0x0b 0x00 2: 8385930 125821080 0xa5 0x80 3: 13420701033543342 0xa5 0x00 4: 16775073066685815 0xa5 0x00 If you really want to zero out sector 0, leave out the oseek (or use oseek=0) - but you're better off using 'fdisk -Bi' to init a new disk. Yes - true enough. Was thinking partition table and typed 'mbr'. Well, what's commonly called 'the partition table' is bytes 0x1be-1ff of the MBR, so I was confused by your writing to sector 1 rather than 0, but have a new theory to test, seeing Chris isn't making any progress; this maybe a victim of the old 'slice vs partition' terminology issue. [snip] The bsdlabel lives in sector 1 (counting from 0) of the slice concerned, specifically the first 0x114 (276d) bytes, in the second sector of the boot blocks. As noted above, in unsliced disks such as memstick.img that's sector 1 of the entire disk, but in ordinary sliced disks it's in sector 1 of the _slice_, so if you'd used (here using Chris' ad4) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4s1 oseek=1 bs=512 count=1 - rather than of=/dev/ad4 - then you would indeed be zeroing out the label, ie the 'partition table' in FreeBSD-speak. Is that perhaps what you had to do to that 6.2 disk, which I suppose was a sliced disk? No. I used the of=/dev/ad4 as described above. However, I think you've hit the nail on the head on one aspect. I believe that 6.2 disk was originally set up as dangerously dedicated. It was so long ago and I had forgotten all about it, but this does dovetail with what your are getting at. The machine that disk went into had been upgraded completely through the 7.x series and on to 8.0-Release before it's disk went up in smoke(literally). I was attempting to do a fresh 'minimal' install of 8.0-Release to the old 6.2 disk pulled off a shelf prior to doing restore(s) of a dump from just the day before. It was only done because it could be done immediately, and a newer, larger, better replacement procured after the fact. Exact copy of error from my notes here: Unable to find device node for /dev/ad4s1b in /dev! The creation of filesystems will be aborted. Then pressing OK brings this: Couldn't make filesystems properly. Aborting. This from sysinstall and occurs after fdisk, labeling, at the point when sysinstall then tries to write out the config to the disk and newfs. At 6.x (and 7.x, I think) it could have been 'dangerously dedicated' ie unsliced .. which option has been removed in 8.x _except_ regarding the memstick.img (appearing as /dev/daXa) .. not half confusing, eh? In any case, it'd be a cheap trick for Chris to try from Fixit, and though it seems unlikely there'd be anything 'leftover' from an earlier install, maybe earlier failure/s have left a broken bsdlabel there? Or any other form of 'garbage'. I'd use the 8.1 LiveFS CD myself just as a personal preference - but either approach should do the job. So at this still-uninstalled stage it couldn't hurt to zero that sector, or even the first 4KB of ad4s1 .. which is /boot/boot1 plus /boot/boot2 (which equals /boot/boot !) before the label section gets written. ie: sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4s1 bs=512 count=8 will remove slice 1's boot blocks entirely, including the bsdlabel. Yes - I agree. Would also be nice to examine it afterward with a hex editor to actually see *if* all writes were zero. Any 'ones' sprinkled in there, especially in the region of the disk we are talking about would indicate corruption. And my wild guess if this is the situation it may possibly indicate some form of subtle hardware incompatibility most likely a clash of firmwares, e.g. controller and disk(s). Some form of non-standard controller implementation, especially wrt to its firmware being buggy. In the OEM world of the likes of HP, DELL, etc, when this happens a
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Sun, 2 Jan 2011 01:15:35 -0500, Chris Brennan wrote: On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 10:20 PM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote: [..] The bsdlabel lives in sector 1 (counting from 0) of the slice concerned, specifically the first 0x114 (276d) bytes, in the second sector of the boot blocks. As noted above, in unsliced disks such as memstick.img that's sector 1 of the entire disk, but in ordinary sliced disks it's in sector 1 of the _slice_, so if you'd used (here using Chris' ad4) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4s1 oseek=1 bs=512 count=1 I would happily run this, but ad4s1 doesn't exist, and hasn't (that I know of), I did do oseek=0 and oseek=1 on /dev/ad4 tho and that didn't change anything, it still says it can't find /dev/ad4s1b (swap obviously) On /dev/ad4, oseek=0 zeroes sector 0, the MBR including DOS partition (FreeBSD slice) table, so that would kill all the slice data, so sure, ad4s1 won't exist. oseek=1 just zeroes an unused sector as we've seen. What you _can_ do from that state is: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 oseek=63 count=8 which will remove the first 4K of (what will be) slice 1, in case there's a misconfigured bsdlabel there, for later. I'm not convinced this is likely your problem, but it can't hurt before slice 1 exists (by virtue of having an entry in the MBR, when it should show up in /dev) At 6.x (and 7.x, I think) it could have been 'dangerously dedicated' ie unsliced .. which option has been removed in 8.x _except_ regarding the memstick.img (appearing as /dev/daXa) .. not half confusing, eh? I actually noticed this today, I had issues writing 8.2BETA1 to a 2GB MicroSD card, so I used a 2.5 external hard-drive and from the fixit prompt I noticed that it wrote a 1gb partition for the BETA1 image and left the rest of the desk untouched (ann 59gb of it). Do you mean you dd'd the memstick.img to the external USB drive? And that booted ok? And sysinstall found it ok, as /dev/ad0a? Details! sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4s1 bs=512 count=8 will remove slice 1's boot blocks entirely, including the bsdlabel. Given you've shown previously that s1 starts at sector 63, so will: sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 oseek=63 count=8 [excuse broken threading, but unless cc'd I have to reply to the digest] I've been trying to keep you in my replies Getting yours fine; that was re my reply to Mike's message. but your down-under, so I don't get your replies till after 1am my time... Anywho, it's late and I need to be up in 8hrs, hopefully this Yeah North America is so yesterday from here (well, 16 hours for you :) can be figured out ... I would hate for the disk to be defective in some way. Of course that's not impossible, but you did say you'd installed some linux on it ok? Clutching at straws, is there anything in your BIOS regarding different SATA modes you can play with? (No SATA disks here) Something else you could try is W)riting the slice table + MBR out from the fdisk menu, then quit sysinstall and reboot. You can do the same after labelling but before newfs'ing .. not generally recommended, but safe enough on a blank disk. If you do the latter, you'll have to reenter your mount points later, so make a note of the order and size of partitions that you specified. Hopefully somebody else has a take on all this, I'm out of ideas .. cheers, Ian ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
Ian Smith wrote: In freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 343, Issue 5, Message: 10 On Tue, 28 Dec 2010 11:02:45 -0500 Chris Brennan xa...@xaerolimit.net wrote: On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 2:23 AM, Michael Powell nightre...@hotmail.comwrote: Try zeroing out the mbr: Boot a LiveFS CD, then at a root prompt do: sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 and: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adx oseek=1 bs=512 count=1 where x equals your drive number. This will zero out any old MBR. Er, no, Mike. The MBR is in sector 0 of the disk; that would zero out sector 1 as oseek=1 skips over sector 0. What's in sector 1 depends on how/whether the disk is sliced. In a 'dangerously dedicated' (unsliced) disk like a memory stick perhaps, this would usually be /boot/boot1 and include the bsdlabel. In a sliced disk, sectors 1 to 62 are typically unused, the first slice usually starting at sector 63. t23% fdisk -s ad0 /dev/ad0: 232581 cyl 16 hd 63 sec PartStartSize Type Flags 1: 63 8385867 0x0b 0x00 2: 8385930 125821080 0xa5 0x80 3: 13420701033543342 0xa5 0x00 4: 16775073066685815 0xa5 0x00 If you really want to zero out sector 0, leave out the oseek (or use oseek=0) - but you're better off using 'fdisk -Bi' to init a new disk. Yes - true enough. Was thinking partition table and typed 'mbr'. Mmm .. it's not clear from Chris' original message exactly what he did. In my case, a temporary replacement disk had FreeBSD 6.2 on it. Something changed wrt to disklabeling on the way to 8-Release and the old 6.2 being present created a situation where that region on the disk was invisible to the new labeling and wouldn't write out. A new install of 8-Release (sysinstall) would error out with the same message as Chris when it came to the point of writing out to the disk. For me, the above 2 commands fixed my situation. Even though his error is the same, I think his problem may be different from mine. -Mike [snip] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 12:24 AM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote:
I don't expect this to be anything like that. Please show a) how many
slices you allocated and how big this FreeBSD slice is and b) how you
partitioned the FreeBSD slice into (and sizes of) / /var/ /usr [/tmp?]
and especially swap.
I wouldn't allocate any less than 1GB for your root (/) partition esp.
if building custom kernel/s; maybe that's fixed in sysinstall for 8.2?
cheers, Ian (please cc me on any reply; I take -questions as a digest)
I cleaned out the thread, leaving only your last bit of questions here.
I did apparently screw up the 'dd' cmd, I retyped it correctly, below is my
(very carefully) retyped recreation of the Fixit prompt;
[..]
Fixit# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 oseek-0 bs=512 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes transferred ub 0.044723 secs (11448 bytes/sec)
Fixit# fdisk -Bi /dev/ad4
*** Working on device /dev/ad4 ***
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=1453521 heads=16 sectors/tracks=63 (1008 blks/cyl)
Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=1453521 heads=16 sectors/tracks=63 (1008 blks/cyl)
Do you want to change our idea of what BIOS thinks ? [n]
[..]
This is where I stopped, admittedly, I do not know how to use FreeBSD's
fdisk. For the sake of brevity and to move along, I'll break fdisk here and
move back to sysinstall and provide what information I can this way.
From sysinstalls menu, I choose 'Standard', next is the usual message about
fdisk partitioning schemes. After this, I get a 'User Confirmation Request',
which is very similar to the warning I received above. It says
[..]
WARNING: It is safe to use a geometry of 1453521/16/63 for ad4 on computers
with modern BIOS versions. If this disk is to be uised on an old machine it
is recommended that it does not have more then 65535 cylinders, more then
255 heads, or more then 63 sectors per track.
Would you like to keep using the current geometry?
Yes No
[..]
This is where I have two choices
Choice 1 (YES) produces the following in fdisk when choosing 'a' to use the
whole disk.
[..]
OffsetSize(ST)EndNamePTypeDescSubtype
Flags
06362-12unused0
6314651491051465149167ad4s18freebsd165
[..]
Choice 2 (NO) produces the following in fdisk when choosing 'a' to use the
whole disk.
[..]
If you are not sure about this, please consult the Hardware Guide in the
Documentation submenu or use the {G}eometry command to change it. Remember:
You need to eneter whatever your BIOS thinks the geometry is! For IDE, it's
what you were told in the BIOS setup. For SCSI, It's the translation mode
your controller is using. Do NOT use a ''physical geometry''.
OK
[..]
[..]
OffsetSize(ST)EndNamePTypeDescSubtype
Flags
06362-12unused0
6314651440021465144064ad4s18freebsd165
146514406551031465149167-12unused0
[..]
Decidedly, the end result is approximately 698GB for the usable partition,
the second choice giving me a padding on both sides of the freebsd slice.
Moving on now, I choose the following
Standard MBR
Disklebel Editor
[..]
PartMountSizenewfs
--
ad4s1a/512MBUFS2 Y
ad4s1bswap4096MBSWAP
ad4s1d/var4973MBUFS2+S Y
ad4s1e/tmp512MBUFS2+S Y
ad4s1f/usr688GBUFS2+S Y
[..]
Decidedly not my first choice for 8.1/amd64, but I can fix that layout
later, once I know how to get the system installed correctly.
'Q' to quick and continue, I choose 'Minimal' then 'CD/DVD' as my
installation media. I got the usual 'Last Chance' warning and then bam, I
get
[..]
Unable to find device node for /dev/ad4s1b in /dev!
The creation of filesystems will be aborted.
OK
Couldn't make filesystems properly. Aborting.
OK
Installation completed with some errors. You may wish to scroll through the
debugging messages on VTY1 with the scroll-lock feature. You can also choose
No at the next prompt and go back into the installation menus to retry
whichever operations have failed.
OK
[..]
And this is where I am left. Hopefully, I've been explicit enough this time
:D Again, if I've missed something, please let me know and I shall provide
it.
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Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Thu, 30 Dec 2010 11:17:48 -0500, Chris Brennan wrote:
On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 12:24 AM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote:
I don't expect this to be anything like that. Please show a) how many
slices you allocated and how big this FreeBSD slice is and b) how you
partitioned the FreeBSD slice into (and sizes of) / /var/ /usr [/tmp?]
and especially swap.
I wouldn't allocate any less than 1GB for your root (/) partition esp.
if building custom kernel/s; maybe that's fixed in sysinstall for 8.2?
I cleaned out the thread, leaving only your last bit of questions here.
Goodo. I'll try chopping a bit too ..
I did apparently screw up the 'dd' cmd, I retyped it correctly, below is my
(very carefully) retyped recreation of the Fixit prompt;
[..]
Fixit# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 oseek-0 bs=512 count=1
Assuming that's 'oseek=0', which is the default anyway.
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes transferred ub 0.044723 secs (11448 bytes/sec)
Fixit# fdisk -Bi /dev/ad4
*** Working on device /dev/ad4 ***
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=1453521 heads=16 sectors/tracks=63 (1008 blks/cyl)
Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=1453521 heads=16 sectors/tracks=63 (1008 blks/cyl)
Do you want to change our idea of what BIOS thinks ? [n]
[..]
This is where I stopped, admittedly, I do not know how to use FreeBSD's
fdisk. For the sake of brevity and to move along, I'll break fdisk here and
move back to sysinstall and provide what information I can this way.
Fair enough. 'what BIOS thinks' here is fine on modern disks/boxes, but
the issue here is what a new(ish) user might conceive of as 'modern'!
From sysinstalls menu, I choose 'Standard', next is the usual message about
fdisk partitioning schemes. After this, I get a 'User Confirmation Request',
which is very similar to the warning I received above. It says
[..]
WARNING: It is safe to use a geometry of 1453521/16/63 for ad4 on computers
with modern BIOS versions. If this disk is to be uised on an old machine it
is recommended that it does not have more then 65535 cylinders, more then
255 heads, or more then 63 sectors per track.
Would you like to keep using the current geometry?
Yes No
[..]
This is where I have two choices
Choice 1 (YES) produces the following in fdisk when choosing 'a' to use the
whole disk.
[..]
OffsetSize(ST)EndNamePTypeDescSubtype
Flags
06362-12unused0
6314651491051465149167ad4s18freebsd165
[..]
Yes, you should go with this. 'modern BIOS versions' here refers to
anything later than (roughly) the mid-90s! An 'old machine' in this
context - remembering sysinstall was originally written then - was one
not using LBA (logical block addressing), when 8GB was a fairly big HD
at least for IDE, when the 'big guys' were mostly using SCSI disks.
That message is actually a lot less scary than it was until a couple of
years ago, when it used to cause much more angst and regular posts, see:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/usr.sbin/sysinstall/disks.c.diff?r1=1.160;r2=1.161;f=h
Choice 2 (NO) produces the following in fdisk when choosing 'a' to use the
whole disk.
[..]
If you are not sure about this, please consult the Hardware Guide in the
Documentation submenu or use the {G}eometry command to change it. Remember:
You need to eneter whatever your BIOS thinks the geometry is! For IDE, it's
what you were told in the BIOS setup. For SCSI, It's the translation mode
your controller is using. Do NOT use a ''physical geometry''.
OK
[..]
[..]
OffsetSize(ST)EndNamePTypeDescSubtype
Flags
06362-12unused0
6314651440021465144064ad4s18freebsd165
146514406551031465149167-12unused0
[..]
Decidedly, the end result is approximately 698GB for the usable partition,
the second choice giving me a padding on both sides of the freebsd slice.
You don't say what alternative geometry you entered here, if any .. but
really this whole thing needs to go away. Maybe it needs some heuristic
to see if it could _even possibly_ be an ancient HD needing alternative
geometry? In any case, anything after 2000 is definitely 'modern'.
Copying this to Bruce Cran, who's been hacking on sysinstall lately.
Moving on now, I choose the following
Standard MBR
Disklebel Editor
[..]
PartMountSizenewfs
--
ad4s1a/512MBUFS2 Y
ad4s1bswap4096MBSWAP
ad4s1d/var4973MBUFS2+S Y
ad4s1e/tmp512MBUFS2+S Y
ad4s1f/usr688GBUFS2+S Y
[..]
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 9:19 PM, Ian Smith smi...@nimnet.asn.au wrote: Goodo. I'll try chopping a bit too .. Cleaning out my cruft, leaving only yours :D Assuming that's 'oseek=0', which is the default anyway. yes, a typo in my e-mail only, I got the cmd right in the installer. Fair enough. 'what BIOS thinks' here is fine on modern disks/boxes, but the issue here is what a new(ish) user might conceive of as 'modern'! I'm left to assume that I have a modern system w/ a modern hard-drive (duh lol) Yes, you should go with this. 'modern BIOS versions' here refers to anything later than (roughly) the mid-90s! An 'old machine' in this context - remembering sysinstall was originally written then - was one not using LBA (logical block addressing), when 8GB was a fairly big HD at least for IDE, when the 'big guys' were mostly using SCSI disks. That message is actually a lot less scary than it was until a couple of years ago, when it used to cause much more angst and regular posts, see: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/usr.sbin/sysinstall/disks.c.diff?r1=1.160;r2=1.161;f=h I think it's fair to say, this is still causing some angst. :( I will check out your link when my brain is far less foggy then it is right now. I'm a bit woozy you could say, nyquil works fast on an empty stomach! You don't say what alternative geometry you entered here, if any .. but really this whole thing needs to go away. Maybe it needs some heuristic to see if it could _even possibly_ be an ancient HD needing alternative geometry? In any case, anything after 2000 is definitely 'modern'. Indeed, I didn't, because I wasn't given a choice by sysinstall, it made the choice for me. Copying this to Bruce Cran, who's been hacking on sysinstall lately. Left Bruce in the CC, hopefully he'll offer some useful advice. :D *crosses fingers* Ok, I've been hunting for a commit message I noticed relatively recently and can't find just now, but I think it was to the effect that Bruce had fixed some breakage when choosing 'A' for auto-partitioning, which you indicated having chosen above. It would appear that the layout changes with each new major revision of FBSD, I have different defaults on the old Sony VAIO on the floor next to me that is running 7.3/i386. Indeed you have, and sorry I missed recalling this issue till now. Bruce may have something to add, but if I'm not mistaken you may just need to NOT use 'A' with your 8.1 install media, but to enter values manually. Alternatively, this may be a good time to grab an 8.2-BETA1 disc1 or memstick image where this is likely fixed, but in any case, if I had a FreeBSD slice with even half of ~700GB I'd be very much more generous with / and /tmp, and /var if you'll be using eg big databases. HTH, Ian No worries on missing it, I'm not sure that helped, I farted around with it again earlier today with little more in the way of success. What I tried was to just set up '/' and swamp and it still prompted me about not being able to find /dev/ad4s1b. I will grab an 8.2B1 image tomorrow when I get up and try that, see if it fairs better. Right now, I must sleep, this side of the world is now just after 1am! C- ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On 12/28/10 16:02, Chris Brennan wrote: Boot a LiveFS CD, then at a root prompt do: sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 and: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adx oseek=1 bs=512 count=1 where x equals your drive number. This will zero out any old MBR. [..] GARBAGEInvalid partition tableError loading operating systemMissing operating systemGARBAGEGARBAGEGARBAGE1+0 records in 1+0 records out 512 bytes transferred in 2.712151 secs (189 bytes/sec) [..] Hi Chris, Are you sure that you got the command right when DDing If you saw Invalid partition tableError loading operating systemMissingoperating system, that suggests to me that you had the equivalent of dd if=/dev/ad4 oseek=1 bs=512 count=1 Here is what I get is I run that DD command on a Windows HDD demophon# dd if=/dev/ada2 bs=512 count=1 3Àм|ûPPü¾¿W¹åó¤Ë½¾±8n| uÅâôÍ▒õÆIt8,tö µ´ð¬tü»´ÍëòNèFs*þF~ t ~ t ¶uÒFV è!s ¶ë¼þ}Uªt ~tÈ ·ë©üWõË¿VÍr#Á$?ÞüC÷ãÑÖ±ÒîB÷â9V w#r9s¸»|NVÍsQOtN2äVÍëäV`»ªU´AÍr6ûUªu0öÁt+a`jjÿv ÿjh|jj´BôÍaasOt 2äVÍëÖaùÃInvalid partition tableError loading operating systemMissing operating system,Dcéêþÿÿ?Á¥P Uª1+0 records in 1+0 records out 512 bytes transferred in 0.363712 secs (1408 bytes/sec) demophon# Paul ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
In freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 343, Issue 5, Message: 10 On Tue, 28 Dec 2010 11:02:45 -0500 Chris Brennan xa...@xaerolimit.net wrote: On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 2:23 AM, Michael Powell nightre...@hotmail.comwrote: Try zeroing out the mbr: Boot a LiveFS CD, then at a root prompt do: sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 and: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adx oseek=1 bs=512 count=1 where x equals your drive number. This will zero out any old MBR. Er, no, Mike. The MBR is in sector 0 of the disk; that would zero out sector 1 as oseek=1 skips over sector 0. What's in sector 1 depends on how/whether the disk is sliced. In a 'dangerously dedicated' (unsliced) disk like a memory stick perhaps, this would usually be /boot/boot1 and include the bsdlabel. In a sliced disk, sectors 1 to 62 are typically unused, the first slice usually starting at sector 63. t23% fdisk -s ad0 /dev/ad0: 232581 cyl 16 hd 63 sec PartStartSize Type Flags 1: 63 8385867 0x0b 0x00 2: 8385930 125821080 0xa5 0x80 3: 13420701033543342 0xa5 0x00 4: 16775073066685815 0xa5 0x00 If you really want to zero out sector 0, leave out the oseek (or use oseek=0) - but you're better off using 'fdisk -Bi' to init a new disk. I have seen this exact error before, and this is what took care of it. -Mike Mmm .. it's not clear from Chris' original message exactly what he did. Mike, Thanks for that little tip, I tried it this morning and it hung for about 30 second w/ no cd/hd activity, then it resumed w/ a beep, it printed some garbage on the console, the only ledgeable was the following [..] GARBAGEInvalid partition tableError loading operating systemMissing operating systemGARBAGEGARBAGEGARBAGE1+0 records in 1+0 records out 512 bytes transferred in 2.712151 secs (189 bytes/sec) [..] This doesn't make sense. Rather than 'I tried it' please show the exact command/s you are issuing. Given it's a new disk you can afford to make mistakes, but once you have anything valuable on a disk you need to take extreme care with dd(1), it's so easy to fatfinger something wrong. eg, what you show above would indicate just what you'd get by running: dd if=/dev/ad4 count=1 ie, using 'if=' not 'of=', with of=/dev/stdout implied, ie to console. If you do want to look at one or more raw sectors, it's very much safer piping dd's stdout to hd (hexdump), as the delays and beep you mention are consistent with piping raw bytes out to the console .. often this can blow your console settings away (I've done it too many times :) If you initialise a disk with the default MBR (or it came that way) then that's usually what's in /boot/mbr - or /boot/boot0 if you've chosen the FreeBSD boot manager, or something else if using (say) grub. t23% dd if=/boot/mbr | hd fc 31 c0 8e c0 8e d8 8e d0 bc 00 7c be 1a 7c bf |.1.|..|.| 0010 1a 06 b9 e6 01 f3 a4 e9 00 8a 31 f6 bb be 07 b1 |..1.| 0020 04 38 2f 74 08 7f 75 85 f6 75 71 89 de 80 c3 10 |.8/t..u..uq.| 0030 e2 ef 85 f6 75 02 cd 18 80 fa 80 72 0b 8a 36 75 |u..r..6u| 0040 04 80 c6 80 38 f2 72 02 8a 14 89 e7 8a 74 01 8b |8.r..t..| 0050 4c 02 bb 00 7c f6 06 bd 07 80 74 2d 51 53 bb aa |L...|.t-QS..| 0060 55 b4 41 cd 13 72 20 81 fb 55 aa 75 1a f6 c1 01 |U.A..r ..U.u| 0070 74 15 5b 66 6a 00 66 ff 74 08 06 53 6a 01 6a 10 |t.[fj.f.t..Sj.j.| 0080 89 e6 b8 00 42 eb 05 5b 59 b8 01 02 cd 13 89 fc |B..[Y...| 0090 72 0f 81 bf fe 01 55 aa 75 0c ff e3 be b9 06 eb |r.U.u...| 00a0 11 be d1 06 eb 0c be f0 06 eb 07 bb 07 00 b4 0e || 00b0 cd 10 ac 84 c0 75 f4 eb fe 49 6e 76 61 6c 69 64 |.u...Invalid| 00c0 20 70 61 72 74 69 74 69 6f 6e 20 74 61 62 6c 65 | partition table| 00d0 00 45 72 72 6f 72 20 6c 6f 61 64 69 6e 67 20 6f |.Error loading o| 00e0 70 65 72 61 74 69 6e 67 20 73 79 73 74 65 6d 00 |perating system.| 00f0 4d 69 73 73 69 6e 67 20 6f 70 65 72 61 74 69 6e |Missing operatin| 0100 67 20 73 79 73 74 65 6d 00 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 |g system| 0110 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 || * 01b0 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 90 80 00 00 || 01c0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 || * 01f0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 55 aa |..U.| 0200 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 512 bytes transferred in 0.079548 secs (6436 bytes/sec) Look familiar? :) That's what 'dd if=/dev/ad4 count=1 | hd' would show on a disk with default MBR, except there'd be the slice data in the MBR section of the boot sector, starting at 0x1be, ending with 'sig' 55aa. Restarting the install process, again accepting defaults, I am again Again, please be more explicit. Defaults for what? One slice covering the
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 2:23 AM, Michael Powell nightre...@hotmail.comwrote: Try zeroing out the mbr: Boot a LiveFS CD, then at a root prompt do: sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 and: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adx oseek=1 bs=512 count=1 where x equals your drive number. This will zero out any old MBR. I have seen this exact error before, and this is what took care of it. -Mike Mike, Thanks for that little tip, I tried it this morning and it hung for about 30 second w/ no cd/hd activity, then it resumed w/ a beep, it printed some garbage on the console, the only ledgeable was the following [..] GARBAGEInvalid partition tableError loading operating systemMissing operating systemGARBAGEGARBAGEGARBAGE1+0 records in 1+0 records out 512 bytes transferred in 2.712151 secs (189 bytes/sec) [..] Restarting the install process, again accepting defaults, I am again presented with [..] 'Unable to find device node for /dev/ad4s1b in dev! The creation of filesystems will be aborted.' OK [..] My question is this now, could this be the fact that this is a really large drive and the bios is 'freaking' out (for lack of a better term) and not properly presenting the disk to the system? While I don't think this is something to consider, something in the back of my head suggests it is. The disk is a different spindle-speed then the old one. [..] 250G - 5400RPM 750G - 7200RPM [..] maybe a (stab in the dark here) bus translation issue, disk is giving the bus too much information? *shrug I dunno, I'm babeling now and I don't have an obnoxious fish in my ear :(. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
Chris Brennan xa...@xaerolimit.net wrote: ... could this be the fact that this is a really large drive and the bios is 'freaking' out (for lack of a better term) and not properly presenting the disk to the system? ... The disk is a different spindle-speed then the old one. [..] 250G - 5400RPM 750G - 7200RPM [..] The RPM is unlikely to be a factor, but the BIOS could well be having trouble with the size / geometry. It might help to let sysinstall use different dimensions for compatibility with older BIOS. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
I've got an HP Business Class laptop (dv2700) and the original 250G SATAII drive is going bad. So I bought a new drive, got a great deal on an SATAII 750G drive for it, bios sees the drive fine. The old drive had FBSD8.2/amd64 installed and it ran fine. I wanted to reinstall to make some partition changes anyway so when I tossed in any install medium I get the following error 'Unable to find device node for /dev/ad4s1b in dev! The creation of filesystems will be aborted.' I didn't select anything crazy and accepted defaults for everything. I figured out the advanced bios option and am in the bios now letting the bios' smart features run there tests (and it just shut down on me, this happens in the winter when the heat is on :( ). Anyway, gonna let it cool down and try the smart tests again. Incidentally, I was able to boot a gentoo disc and set up an ext4 filesystem on the same disk and it worked fine, so I don't understand why freebsd can't preform a newfs on the drive. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop
Chris Brennan wrote: I've got an HP Business Class laptop (dv2700) and the original 250G SATAII drive is going bad. So I bought a new drive, got a great deal on an SATAII 750G drive for it, bios sees the drive fine. The old drive had FBSD8.2/amd64 installed and it ran fine. I wanted to reinstall to make some partition changes anyway so when I tossed in any install medium I get the following error 'Unable to find device node for /dev/ad4s1b in dev! The creation of filesystems will be aborted.' I didn't select anything crazy and accepted defaults for everything. I figured out the advanced bios option and am in the bios now letting the bios' smart features run there tests (and it just shut down on me, this happens in the winter when the heat is on :( ). Anyway, gonna let it cool down and try the smart tests again. Incidentally, I was able to boot a gentoo disc and set up an ext4 filesystem on the same disk and it worked fine, so I don't understand why freebsd can't preform a newfs on the drive. ___ Try zeroing out the mbr: Boot a LiveFS CD, then at a root prompt do: sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 and: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adx oseek=1 bs=512 count=1 where x equals your drive number. This will zero out any old MBR. I have seen this exact error before, and this is what took care of it. -Mike ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
