From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Aug 24 08:50:35 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5B32F16A4BF for ; Sun, 24 Aug 2003 08:50:35 -0700 (PDT) Received: from out005.verizon.net (out005pub.verizon.net [206.46.170.143]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3772343F93 for ; Sun, 24 Aug 2003 08:50:34 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from mac.com ([68.237.14.199]) by out005.verizon.net (InterMail vM.5.01.05.33 201-253-122-126-133-20030313) with ESMTP id <20030824155033.TZLU15786.out005.verizon.net@mac.com>; Sun, 24 Aug 2003 10:50:33 -0500 Message-ID: <3F48DEC5.9070802@mac.com> Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2003 11:50:29 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lukek References: <00d801c3698c$aa559820$230aa8c0@MAGOME> <20030823232831.GA4596@rot13.obsecurity.org> <000601c369ef$6f727c60$080aa8c0@yujo> In-Reply-To: <000601c369ef$6f727c60$080aa8c0@yujo> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.76.4.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Info: Submitted using SMTP AUTH at out005.verizon.net from [68.237.14.199] at Sun, 24 Aug 2003 10:50:33 -0500 cc: FreeBSD Subject: Re: Is this disk toast ? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2003 15:50:35 -0000 lukek wrote: > I have tried re-formatting this disk and even whacked it into a winblows box > with the hope of writing out another partition table but no luck thus far. > > Can someone give me some ideas on what to do about this ? Start my making sure your machine has the latest BIOS flashed, then check whether you can set the drive to "LBA" mode rather than, say, "auto". If your hardware is having problems identifying the drive geometry properly, this may help. Then use /stand/sysinstall to repartition the disk, although you could also use FDISK from DOS as a last resort. Sometimes creating a small (10MB) DOS partition before installing FreeBSD also helps resolve disk geometry problems. [ If you can't partition the drive even via MS-DOS' FDISK, you most likely have a hardware problem. ] -- -Chuck