From owner-freebsd-stable Wed May 2 14:14:53 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from earth.backplane.com (earth-nat-cw.backplane.com [208.161.114.67]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4CA7C37B423 for ; Wed, 2 May 2001 14:14:50 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon@earth.backplane.com) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by earth.backplane.com (8.11.2/8.11.2) id f42LETo95078; Wed, 2 May 2001 14:14:29 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon) Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 14:14:29 -0700 (PDT) From: Matt Dillon Message-Id: <200105022114.f42LETo95078@earth.backplane.com> To: Valentin Nechayev Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Strange BTX halted error References: <200105011806.f41I6UN69612@earth.backplane.com> <20010502110520.B340@iv.nn.kiev.ua> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG :... :> 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? Yah, I tried that... didn't work. What did work was blowing away (zeroing) the beginning of the disk and then re-partitioning it from scratch using a real DOS disk partition and boot0 (using fdisk -BI), and installing boot1 and boot2 on the FreeBSD slice with disklabel's new ability to install boot sectors on slices, using 'disklabel -w -r -B da0s1 auto'. That worked. I incorporated the sequence into the disklabel manual page near the end of the EXAMPLES section. :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 I haven't had to do that. Yet. -Matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message