From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Oct 30 09:46:15 1995 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id JAA05249 for questions-outgoing; Mon, 30 Oct 1995 09:46:15 -0800 Received: from who.cdrom.com (who.cdrom.com [192.216.222.3]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id JAA05244 for ; Mon, 30 Oct 1995 09:46:10 -0800 Received: from mailgate.ericsson.se (mailgate.ericsson.se [130.100.2.2]) by who.cdrom.com (8.6.12/8.6.11) with ESMTP id JAA21642 for ; Mon, 30 Oct 1995 09:45:52 -0800 Received: from egg.lmc.ericsson.se (egg.lmc.ericsson.se [142.133.32.1]) by mailgate.ericsson.se (8.6.11/1.0) with SMTP id SAA00661 for ; Mon, 30 Oct 1995 18:44:43 +0100 Received: from wheatear.lmc.ericsson.com (wheatear.lmc.ericsson.se) by egg.lmc.ericsson.se (4.1/LME-2.2) id AA28655; Mon, 30 Oct 95 12:44:35 EST Received: from wheatear (localhost) by wheatear.lmc.ericsson.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA00395; Mon, 30 Oct 95 12:44:34 EST Message-Id: <9510301744.AA00395@wheatear.lmc.ericsson.com> Date: Mon, 30 Oct 95 12:44:35 -0500 From: Eric Primeau Organization: Ericsson Research Inc. X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.12 (X11; I; SunOS 4.1.3_U1 sun4m) Mime-Version: 1.0 To: questions@freebsd.org, lmcerpr@LMC.ericsson.se Subject: ioctl DIOCWLABEL ?!? (Re: Missing operating system) X-Url: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/snapshots.html Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk > 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 ========================================================