From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Nov 27 19:14:23 2004 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 8D82716A4CE for ; Sat, 27 Nov 2004 19:14:23 +0000 (GMT) Received: from charm.daemonsecurity.com (FW-182-254.go.retevision.es [62.174.254.182]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 101D843D31 for ; Sat, 27 Nov 2004 19:14:23 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from norgaard@locolomo.org) Received: from [192.168.0.32] (charm.daemonsecurity.com [192.168.0.32]) by charm.daemonsecurity.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 277E617004 for ; Sat, 27 Nov 2004 20:14:18 +0100 (CET) Message-ID: <41A8D1FA.8030005@locolomo.org> Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 20:14:02 +0100 From: Erik Norgaard User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20041114 X-Accept-Language: en, en-us, da, it, es MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Lost MBR/wrong disk geometry 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: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 19:14:23 -0000 Hi, It appears that I have screwed my disk (60GB) thoroughly. I had used the sample install.cfg for sysinstall but it has "partition=exclusive" and not "all". I did dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 count=1k as explained in the faq, and the exclusive partioning was gone. I can run sysinstall, slice up the disk and install stuff. But on reboot the system doesn't find a usefull mbr. I can boot up a rescue disk, mount the partitions, read data stored and use any programs installed. But I can't recover or create a new mbr with dd if=/boot/mbr of=/dev/ad0 or with /boot/boot0, or use fdisk to manually set slices and active slice, run sysinstall and choose a bootmanager or similar. Please, how to I get back an mbr and a working partition table? Thanks! Cheers, Erik PS: When sysinstall ran first, it complained about a wrong geometry, 116280/16/63 and tried to rewrite it to 7296/255/63. The bios reports 28728/16/255 and the label on the disk sais 16383/16/63. Accepting the geometry from sysinstall would make the installation complete but on reboot the system booted up with the old geometry. On my laptop my disk (40GB) has geometry 77520/16/63 so I hacked up sysinstall to accept the geomtry (a simple change). With this I can slice up the disk and install the system. I don't know if this is right, but from my current state, I'd say that the only thing is the mbr not being written correctly to the disk... -- Ph: +34.666334818 web: www.locolomo.org S/MIME Certificate: http://www.locolomo.org/crt/2004071206.crt Subject ID: A9:76:7A:ED:06:95:2B:8D:48:97:CE:F2:3F:42:C8:F2:22:DE:4C:B9 Fingerprint: 4A:E8:63:38:46:F6:9A:5D:B4:DC:29:41:3F:62:D3:0A:73:25:67:C2