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Date:      Wed, 2 May 2001 11:05:20 +0300
From:      Valentin Nechayev <netch@iv.nn.kiev.ua>
To:        Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com>
Cc:        stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Strange BTX halted error
Message-ID:  <20010502110520.B340@iv.nn.kiev.ua>
In-Reply-To: <200105011806.f41I6UN69612@earth.backplane.com>; from dillon@earth.backplane.com on Tue, May 01, 2001 at 11:06:30AM -0700
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.33.0105011046470.30516-100000@sdmail0.sd.bmarts.com> <200105011806.f41I6UN69612@earth.backplane.com>

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 Tue, May 01, 2001 at 11:06:30, dillon (Matt Dillon) wrote about "Re: Strange BTX halted error": 

>     I was getting BTX halted failures due to BIOS confusion related to
>     dangerously dedicated partitions.  It's what prompted me to fix the
>     disklabel code to allow boot blocks to be installed on slices.
>     Unfortunately, the only way I could fix my particular problem was
>     to get rid of my dangerously dedicated partition which meant blowing
>     away the hard drive and repartitioning and relabeling it.

If disk is `dangerously dedicated', sector 0:0:1 is occupied with boot1,
which does not use master PT area (0x1BE-0x1FF) and even contains
a simple fake valid PT. Did you ever try to set there something syntactically
valid for your BIOS and enough to allow loading of specific "bootloader"?
If you did, what was the problem?

P.S. On our FreeBSD hosts bunch we almost proved practically that the
only safe partitioning is to create DOS slices (with below-cyl-1024
bootable one) with LBA geometry specified to fdisk. Any another approach
leads to something strange effects: e.g. BTX cannot load /boot/loader
and loads kernel directly, with natural `nlist failed'. But we never
tried to change fake PT on dedicated disk directly.


/netch

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