Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 17:44:09 +1100 From: "Steve Hearn"<Steve_Hearn@digicon-brs.com.au> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Vanishing FreeBSD Disk Partitions. Message-ID: <CA2564F4.001C8A6B.00@brisbane.digicon-brs.com.au>
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This relates to FreeBSD Disk Partitions spontaneously ' vanishing' on
several of our high-profile machines.
I posted a brief message a month or so ago, but the problem has been
recurring
so I've decided to include a bit more detail.
If you have a couple of minutes I'd REALLY appreciate if you can look
through the
following and make ANY comments that might throw light on this frustrating
problem.
_____________________________________________________________
We've been testing FreeBSD 2.2.2 on several Pentium and 486 boxes for
several months
with good results. So much so that I persuaded my boss to cancel an order
for some new HP
workstations and instead buy 3 high end Pentium IIs, to run as FreeBSD
workstations.
These are Gateway Pentium II (266 MHz, 64MB ram, 3.2GB EIDE Disk).
No problems with the install, except I had to bypass the ULTRA DMA disk
interface, and
just plug the disk straight into the IDE controller on the motherboard.
Gateway confirmed
there is no problem with doing this and it seemed to work fine.
Here is the original partition setup for the one which failed last night
for third time. It's
representative of the other two machines which have also both failed at
different times.
The stripes are in the following sequence on disk.
DOS stripe 350MB
Main BSD Stripe 2GB (Bootable)
Second BSD Stripe 750MB (Not Bootable This was kept separate in case I
needed to give it back to DOS later).
The partitions created inside my main BSD Stripe were:
/ 64M
swap 200M
/var 200M
/usr 750M
/scratch1 780M
Hence my root partition lies well within the first 504MB limit (as talked
about on p29 of The
Complete FreeBSD book).
The second BSD Stripe was just one partition /scratch2 = 750MB.
Following the install the machine runs fine for up to several weeks. In
each case the failure
seems to have occurred at night and we suspect a power loss or surge
causing a spontaneous reboot.
The machines are all securely locked away after hours. Definitely no
likelihood of them
all being 'hacked' at.
Basically when I arrive at work I'm greeted with the console screen,
cycling with the following:
F1 . . . DOS
F3 . . . BSD
Default F2 (it waits 5 seconds then repeats these 3 lines)
If I select F1, The machine will boot to DOS OK.
If I select F2 I just get the same thing cycling again.
If I select F3 it tries to boot off the third stripe, but naturally fails
with a 'Can't find kernel'
message since that isn't a bootable stripe.
If I then boot from a FreeBSD Install Floppy, as it comes up it sees the
hard disk as follows:
wd0: 3079MB (6306048 sectors), 6256 cyls, 16 heads, 63 S/T, 512 B/S
After it boots from the floppy, if I go in and look at the Partitions
here's what I see:
___________________________________________________________________________
__
Disk Name: wd0
Disk Geometry: 782 cyls / 128 heads / 63 sectors = 6306048 sectors
Offset Size End Name Ptype Desc
Subtype Flags
0 63 62 - 6
unused 0
63 685377 685439 wd0s1 2 fat
6
685440 4088448 4773887 - 6 unused
0
4773888 1532160 6306047 wd0s3 3 freebsd 165
C
___________________________________________________________________________
____
The second-last stripe, which was my BSD boot stripe is showing up as
unused!!
What other info can I give you to go on?
The 2 lots of BIOS info that comes up as it boots is as follows:
Matrox Power Graphics Accelerator
MGA Series VGA/VBE BIOS V2.2
Copyright Matrox Graphics Inc
Copyright LSI Logic Corp
AMI BIOS
BIOS VERSION 1.00.01.DT0T
(c) 1992 - 1997 Intel Corp
___________________________________________________________________
I've left the most recent failure basically as it was after the failure, in
case any one suggests
anything else I can check out etc.
If anyone out there has ANY suggestions I'd really appreciate them.
I'm under a heap of pressure from the boss to scrap the FreeBSD concept on
these
boxes and run them up as NT boxes.! And that would really be frustrating
after
all the time I've put into this. So come on guys suggestions Pleeease!
Steve Hearn
Development Geophysicist
Digicon Geophysical
Queensland Centre for Advanced Technologies
Pinjarra Hills 4069
Brisbane
AUSTRALIA
Phone + 617 3878 9900
Fax + 617 3878 9977
email steveh@digicon-brs.com.au
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