From owner-freebsd-current Mon Aug 2 2: 1:37 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from critter.freebsd.dk (critter.freebsd.dk [212.242.40.131]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2E63314F6B for ; Mon, 2 Aug 1999 02:01:29 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from phk@critter.freebsd.dk) Received: from critter.freebsd.dk (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by critter.freebsd.dk (8.9.3/8.9.2) with ESMTP id KAA23590; Mon, 2 Aug 1999 10:59:10 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from phk@critter.freebsd.dk) To: Robert Nordier Cc: mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith), bde@zeta.org.au (Bruce Evans), current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: junior-hacker task: "prepdisk" In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 02 Aug 1999 10:55:44 +0200." <199908020855.KAA20495@m2-4-dbn.dial-up.net> Date: Mon, 02 Aug 1999 10:59:10 +0200 Message-ID: <23588.933584350@critter.freebsd.dk> From: Poul-Henning Kamp Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In message <199908020855.KAA20495@m2-4-dbn.dial-up.net>, Robert Nordier writes: >> >What fails? Can you be more specific? How recent are your boot1/boot2 >> >blocks? I would be inclined to dd at least 8k over the front of the >> >disk myself, but I don't think that's relevant in your case. >> >> Disk error #1 while trying to load boot/loader. I think the bios >> in this case trust the 50000 in the length field of the mbr. > >Any better luck after enabling "LBA access" in boot1 as a build >option (added back a few weeks ago), or does the BIOS not support >this? > >BTW: Is this a genuine hard drive, or some form of disk-on-a-chip? >I seem to recall the BIOS geometry in some cases uses a small number >of sectors per track, which may push part of the 'a' partition >beyond the 1023 CHS limit. I've seen this on both flash disks and real disks. The flash disks have geometries which put them firmly inside 1023 cyls: fla0 maddr 0xd0000 msize 8192 on isa fla0: fla0: 39.1MB (80144 sectors), 1001 cyls, 16 heads, 5 S/T, 512 B/S fla1 maddr 0xd2000 msize 8192 on isa fla1: fla1: 70.5MB (144320 sectors), 1002 cyls, 16 heads, 9 S/T, 512 B/S fla2 maddr 0xd4000 msize 8192 on isa fla2: fla2: 39.1MB (80144 sectors), 1001 cyls, 16 heads, 5 S/T, 512 B/S fla3 maddr 0xd6000 msize 8192 on isa fla3: fla3: 141.0MB (288832 sectors), 1002 cyls, 16 heads, 18 S/T, 512 B/S fla4 maddr 0xd8000 msize 8192 on isa fla4: fla4: 7.8MB (15920 sectors), 995 cyls, 16 heads, 1 S/T, 512 B/S So cyl 1024 should not even enter in the equation... My real beef here is not with the boot failure but with the fact that our command line tools stink when I bring in a new blank disk... -- Poul-Henning Kamp FreeBSD coreteam member phk@FreeBSD.ORG "Real hackers run -current on their laptop." FreeBSD -- It will take a long time before progress goes too far! To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message