*BSD News Article 49605


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From: bs@Germany.EU.net (Bernard Steiner)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: WD1007 and FreeBSD, OK what's the magic?
Date: 29 Aug 1995 11:00:57 +0200
Organization: EUnet Deutschland GmbH, Dortmund, Germany
Lines: 37
Message-ID: <41ul09$aml@Germany.EU.net>
References: <id.GEWM1.1B6@nmti.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: qwerty.germany.eu.net


In article <id.GEWM1.1B6@nmti.com>, peter@nmti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
|> Controller: WD1007-WA4, jumpered for translation OFF.
|> Drives: wd0, wd1: ESDI, 1225 cyl, 15 head, 35 tracks.
|> Partitioning: 2 slices, 377 cylinders for root+swap, rest for /usr.
|> Disklabel looks fine from floppy. I can even boot and get a holographic
|> shell chrooted under /mnt and it's all happy.
|> 
|> Symptom: Won't boot. "Bad disklabel". I assume it's barfing because it's
|> 	looking at LBA addresses and the disklabel's in the wrong place.
|> 	I can't do a whole disk because BAD144 would blow up. I can't use
|> 	<1024 cylinders because install doesn't give that option.

I had similar problems with sysinstall. Have a look at your vt1 screen
during the run of bad144 on your drives.

I bet the calculation for the location of the bad144 spare sectors is dead
wrong. If you are lucky enough to get through to the holographic shell,
you may be able to get a minimal system running on the other drive (presumably
wd1) manually; typical snags are:

a) you must get fdisk to run on /dev/rwd1 without barfing
b) the first slice (fdisk partition) must contain the minimal root filesystem
   thus, you have to get a disklabel onto the appropriate slice, and remember
   to do a bad144 run on that slice
c) make sure that disklabel -r and fdisk and bad144 are happy about your wd1
d) do an install-by-hand onto wd1; remember to copy a kernel there... the
   /stand stuff is in the rootfs image (some sort of gzip'd archive)
e) boot boot off the floppy, tell it to boot the kernel off wd1
f) if you're lucky, you'll be able to repeat the process on wd0 and get the
   *actual* system running there.

The whole process took me only about 24 hours, what with having to boot the
kernels with -c and configuring various drivers all the time :-(

Good luck
	Bernard