netbsd-help: Re: tekram DC390 does not find netbsd :-(
Subject: Re: tekram DC390 does not find netbsd :-(
To: None
<pooka@iki.fi>
From: Brad Spencer
<brad@anduin.eldar.org>
List: netbsd-help
Date: 11/30/1999 17:33:14
On Tue Nov 30 1999 at 16:01:02 +0100, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
[snip]
> > Partition table:
> > 0: <UNUSED>
> > 1: <UNUSED>
> > 2: <UNUSED>
> > 3: sysid 169 (NetBSD)
> > start 212, size 8890008 (4340 MB), flag 0x80
> > beg: cylinder 0, head 1, sector 1
> > end: cylinder 1023, head 255, sector 63
> >
> > I tried various BIOS disk geometries. What can it be?
>
> Actually your BIOS geometry and partition infos don't match.
> (partition ends at head 255/sect63 but you only have 64 head and 32 sects ???).
> You should at last adjust this (or let fdisk do it: just start fdisk -u sd0,
> say you want to change partition 3 and press enter to accept default values).
>
> But the start is not aligned on a cylinder boundary, this may cause problems.
> You may want to 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd0d bs=64k count=10' (just
> to be sure) and reinstall.
> The NetBSD installation tool should find a BIOS geometry by itself and ask if
> it's correct. It is in most cases.
I fought with this quite a lot. Or at least I think it is this that I
fought with. But anyways, I couldn't make the SCSI adapter find NetBSD
no matter what I did when I did it with NetBSD fdisk. Finally I made a
dos-bootable floppy and used pfdisk.exe. That made the difference.
pfdisk does put partitions ending on cylinder boundaries, but that is
not the key, at least that's what others have said.
I think this is the same problem as the one described in port-i386/8309
--
"Never underestimate the power of the Lite side of the \Source/"
Antti Kantee / NetBSD \ 1973 <- draken \ / o
<pooka@iki.fi> / http://www.netbsd.org \ platters -> 1999 \ / |
______________/ Free Multiplatform UN*X \___________________\/__ |
I have also been struggling with trying to get a SCSI disk bootable with
NetBSD on one of my machines. About the only conclusion I have come to is
that the "start", as listed with fdisk [in the above example, 212], must
be the start of the NetBSD "c" [using i386 speak] as listed in the
disklabel. If this is not true, it seems to create a situation where the
disk has a label, but is not bootable. I have such a thing going on at
here, where the start of a boot disk got set to 0. The system and disk is
usable in all respects, except that it can't be booted. If I reset the
start to 63, where the "c" partition actually is, the system looses track
of the disklabel.
Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org http://anduin.eldar.org
[finger brad@anduin.eldar.org for PGP public key]