Date: 01 Aug 2002 05:24:23 -0700 From: Cherie & John Carri <cjcarri@earthlink.net> To: FreeBSD questions mailing list <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Can FreeBSD make a hard drie unbootable by other OS's? Message-ID: <1028204666.25136.30.camel@bilbo.ourhome.org>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Many thanks to all the folks who emailed suggestions, with special thanks to Siegbert Baude. To recap, I transferred an old 4.3 Gig Western Digital drive I was formerly using on a FreeBSD 4.2 system to a newer PC, and attempted to install Mandrake Linux 8.2; the install was successful, but I could not boot from the hard drive, only the floppy or CDROM. I wiped the drive, created a DOS partition, formatted it, then ran the DOS "fdisk /mbr". I then installed Windows98SE on it, just to see what would happen; Win98 also would boot from the floppy but not the hard drive. I then tried the "dd" command to overwrite the master boot record, as suggested to me by others on this list, and reinstalled Mandrake Linux 8.2 - with the same result as before! At Siegbert Baude's suggestion, I booted into Linux with the boot floppy, and ran "ls -l /dev/hda". The result was extremely weird, see output of this command quoted below: ------------------------------ Disk /dev/hda: 240 heads, 63 sectors, 557 cylinders Units: Cylinders of 15120*512 bytes. Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 557 4210888+ 5 Extended Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings: physical (524, 59,63) logical (556,239,63) Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary physical(524,59,63) should be (524,239,3) /dev/hda2 9 44 265072+ 82 Linux swap Partition 2 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?) physical=(8,0,1) logical=(8,120,1) Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings physical(40,254,63) logical(43,134,63) ....similar errors for other partitions.... -------------------------------- After this I tried booting from the Mandrake Linux CD and going into rescue mode. Among the rescue tools was this statement: "Use lsparts to list your partitions with types". Accordingly I opened a terminal and typed lsparts: #lsparts hda2 258 MB, type <0x82> (linux swap) hda5 62 MB, type <0x83> (ext2) hda6 1,192 MB, type <0x83> (ext2) hda5 1,1798 MB, type <0x83> (ext2) Which also looks very weird: no hda1 listed, my /boot partition shows up as /hda5 instead, and what's even weirder, the filesystem types for the three non-swap partitions show up as ext2, even though I created them as ext3 (one of the journaling file systems for Linux). As a final attempt, at Siegbert Baude's suggestion, I erased all partitions on the disk, created a single 400MB FAT32 (DOS) partition, booted from a DOS boot disk, ran fdisk /mbr, and format c: /s, and then attempted to get the PC to boot from this bootable DOS partition on the hard drive. The system would not boot, displaying the "Disk Boot failure, Insert system disk and press enter" message. I'm not sure what is going on, but I guess either the drive's partition table and or MBR are truly messed up, or I have a bad drive on my hands - maybe it died while I was transferring it from one PC to the other, despite the anti-static pad and wrist-strap I used. I'm going to get another hard drive to get this system up, as I need to get it working fairly quickly. Meantime, does anyone think my old 4.3 Gig drive is still salvageable, or is it time to use it to help fill up the local landfill? Thanks, -John Carri To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?1028204666.25136.30.camel>