Date: Mon, 30 Oct 95 12:44:35 -0500 From: Eric Primeau <lmcerpr@LMC.ericsson.se> To: questions@freebsd.org, lmcerpr@LMC.ericsson.se Subject: ioctl DIOCWLABEL ?!? (Re: Missing operating system) Message-ID: <9510301744.AA00395@wheatear.lmc.ericsson.com>
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> Eric Primeau stands accused of saying:
>> PLEASE HELP ME!!
>> I am facing the famous "Missing operating system" problem.
Hi everyone,
I'm back with more questions. Thanks to Michael Smith, Didier Derny
and D.Marck for their suggestions.
A week later and still no FreeBSD booting from disk. Bummer.
Here's my current situation: I got rid of the "Missing OS" message
somehow and installed Booteasy manually. It now allows me to select
between both disks; however when I try booting of "freebsd", it
returns to the F? prompt. (Better than before, but no cigar.)
I disconnected my C: disk (the current DOS bootdisk) and kept just one 1Gb
disk.
I then attempted to do the FreeBSD installation on it (thinking maybe the
problem stems from the existence of that first DOS disk, maybe FreeBSD
installs better on a dedicated disk).
The problem remains the same; FreeBSD just wont boot from my 1Gb disk.
(I mean I tried everything thinkable around disk geometry.)
OK. I discovered the alt-F4 holographic shell you can access during and
after the FreeBSD installation. So I decided to use it to snoop around.
I tried the "fdisk" command and it gave me a strange error message (more
on this later); then I looked at "disklabel" which is supposed to
be used by the installation process.
[NOTE: My disk has two partitions: one for FreeBSD and the other for DOS.
I use the DOS partition to store the freebsd directory files
for the installation.]
Observe:
disklabel /dev/wd0 works OK as expected. I see all the partitions.
disklabel -r /dev/wd0 gives me an error message:
"Bad pack magic number (label is damaged or pack is unlabeled)"
disklabel -W /dev/wd0 gives me the SAME error message as fdisk, e.g.:
"ioctl DIOCWLABEL: Operation not supported by device"
Are the two errors related?
Could this be why I cant boot off the disk?
Is there anyone out there kind enough to let me know if I didnt format
the disk correctly, or if there is some kind of problem I should be aware of?
PLEASE HELP!!!!
In the meanwhile, I give up; I'm going back to Doom and (sigh!)
Windows 3.1 ;-P
Best regards,
/Eric "desperately-seeking-a-booting-freebsd"
========================================================
Eric PRIMEAU lmcerpr@lmc.ericsson.se
Software Engineer (514) 738-8300 x2371
Ericsson Research Inc. Montreal (Qc) Canada
========================================================
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