From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Mar 19 02:26:40 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 98F7E106564A for ; Wed, 19 Mar 2008 02:26:40 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from dkelly@hiwaay.net) Received: from bee.hiwaay.net (bee.hiwaay.net [216.180.54.11]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4106C8FC13 for ; Wed, 19 Mar 2008 02:26:40 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from dkelly@hiwaay.net) Received: from [10.0.0.183] ([216.186.148.249]) (authenticated bits=0) by bee.hiwaay.net (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id m2J2QaMG1409362 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=RC4-SHA bits=128 verify=NO) for ; Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:26:39 -0500 (CDT) Message-Id: <76C6FE72-043C-4EFB-8598-98BB73E11345@hiwaay.net> From: David Kelly To: FreeBSD Questions In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v919.2) Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:26:35 -0500 References: X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.919.2) Subject: Re: bsdlabel, now no boot X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list Reply-To: FreeBSD Questions List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 02:26:40 -0000 On Mar 18, 2008, at 1:45 PM, David Kelly wrote: > Cutting to the chase, my Windows-style partition table is sane (does > the FreeBSD "partition" need to be marked bootable?), and my BSD > slice table appears to be reasonable and sane. But the drive is not > bootable. > > "fdisk -B ad0" didn't hurt nor help. No error message. > "fdisk -Bi ad0" didn't hurt nor help. No error message. > "bsdlabel -B ad0s1" didn't hurt nor help. No error message. > > The only error messages have been in sysinstall running from the 6.1 > minimal installation. > > Is probably a good time for me to wipe this drive and install 7.0, > but now that I have reached that conclusion and have nothing else to > loose I'd like to learn how to recover from this situation. "nothing else to *lose*", silly me. Having had a fresh attack at my broken system tonight I discovered the original PATA drive boots if I disable the SATA drives in BIOS. What appears to be happening is that no matter the BIOS is told to boot "IDE" (and doesn't have a SATA boot option) once the SATA drives have enough formatting to look bootable to BIOS, the BIOS boots the ad4 SATA drive rather than the ad0 PIDE drive. :-( I was trying to geom stripe ad4 and ad6, not ad4s1 and ad6s1. Made my gstripe with ad4s1 and ad6s1 so that the boot MBR stays untouched. System is now booting ad0 by starting at ad4 and hopping to ad6, then to ad0. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@HiWAAY.net ======================================================================== Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.