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From: Bill Fenner <fenner@parc.xerox.com>
To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org, jkh@freebsd.org, phk@freebsd.org
Subject: 2.2-ALPHA install failure
Message-Id: <96Nov22.231207pst.177557@crevenia.parc.xerox.com>
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 1996 23:12:07 PST
Sender: owner-current@freebsd.org
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Hi,

  I finally got my replacement Medalist 1080sl from Seagate, so I
  decided to install 2.2-ALPHA on it.  Although the new install went
reasonably well, it won't reboot the new disk.  I used the "dangerously
dedicated" mode, so that I wouldn't have to deal with partition tables
and weird track values and stuff.  Woo, was I wrong.  The very first
thing the install said to me was that the value of 4839 cylinders, 109
sectors/track was ridiculous and that it was setting it to 64/32.  Er,
ok, whatever.

When I tried booting the drive as sd2, I would try either 2:sd(2,a)/kernel
or just sd(2,a)/kernel, and get:

dosdev = 82, biosdrive = 2, unit = 2, maj = 4
Invalid format!

Then, even if I tried to boot from the boot floppy by saying fd(0,a), it
would say

dosdev = 0, biosdrive = 0, unit = 0, maj = 2
Invalid format!

But if I rebooted, and just let the floppy time out, it would say

dosdev = 0, biosdrive = 0, unit = 0, maj = 2

but work just fine.

Ok, so I unplugged the flaky drive from the SCSI bus, so that the new drive
is now the second SCSI disk; maybe it was having trouble with loading stuff
off of the third disk.  Now I get the dreaded:

Error: C 2000>1023 (bios limit) error.  I booted the fixit floppy,
checked the disklabel, and discovered that the installer had written
a disklabel with 1 sector per track, 1 track per cylinder, 1 sector
per cylinder, and 2000000+ cylinders.  I got the proper data for my disk
from the Seagate web page and edited it into the disklabel.  The bootstrap
still complains that C 2000>1023, even though disklabel -r /dev/sd1c
shows that the a partition goes from cylinder 0 to 150.

This is a problem that I occasionally had with the old bootloader, and
everyone told me that it couldn't be happening.  The problem always
went away if I built a new kernel and reinstalled it.  Perhaps that's
what I'll try next in the fixit disk environment.  Does anyone have any
other suggestions on how to get this to boot?

Thanks,
  Bill