From owner-freebsd-hackers  Fri Oct 27  2:15: 0 2000
Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Received: from earth.backplane.com (placeholder-dcat-1076843399.broadbandoffice.net [64.47.83.135])
	by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP
	id 9882037B479; Fri, 27 Oct 2000 02:14:51 -0700 (PDT)
Received: (from dillon@localhost)
	by earth.backplane.com (8.11.1/8.9.3) id e9R9E5Y03182;
	Fri, 27 Oct 2000 02:14:05 -0700 (PDT)
	(envelope-from dillon)
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 02:14:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com>
Message-Id: <200010270914.e9R9E5Y03182@earth.backplane.com>
To: Mike Smith <msmith@mass.osd.bsdi.com>
Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Really odd "BTX halted" problem booting FreeBSD on VALinux hardware 
References:  <200010270826.e9R8QWF01184@mass.osd.bsdi.com>
Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Precedence: bulk
X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG

:> 
:> :I'm just curious.  How many disks are in this box?  We saw something
:> :similar here at work and it turned out that there were multiple disklabels
:> :on the other disks and for somereason it was confusing the loader.
:> :We dd'd the bad sections off and everything worked.
:
:Are you sure it's confusing the loader?  Matt's fault address puts it in 
:the BIOS at 0xc800, which is probably the SCSI adapter's BIOS...> 

    I'm confusing something.  If I clear the disk by dd'ing it, the machine
    boots (diskless) fine.  

    If I do this:
	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 bs=32k count=4
	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1 bs=32k count=4
	disklabel -w -r da0 auto
	disklabel -w -r da1 auto
	reboot

    The machine will boot diskless just fine.  fdisk reports:

Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 1 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 2 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 3 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 4 is:
sysid 165,(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
    start 63, size 143363997 (70001 Meg), flag 80 (active)
        beg: cyl 0/ sector 1/ head 1;
        end: cyl 731/ sector 63/ head 254


	*****************************************************

    If I install boot blocks it seems to whack the partition info, and if
    I reboot after this point the machine is fracked -- the boot loader blows
    up in the BIOS (i.e. the BIOS blows up) trying to scan the disks.

	disklabel -B da0
	disklabel -B da1

	fdisk da0
******* Working on device /dev/da0 *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=8924 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)

Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=8924 heads=255 sectors/track=63 (16065 blks/cyl)

Media sector size is 512
Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 1 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 2 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 3 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 4 is:
sysid 165,(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
    start 0, size 50000 (24 Meg), flag 80 (active)
        beg: cyl 0/ sector 1/ head 0;
        end: cyl 1023/ sector 63/ head 255

    reboot...
    BEWM!!!!!!!

	*****************************************************

    HEEELP!  Why is the simple installation of boot blocks by disklabel
    screwing up the partition table?

						-Matt



To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message