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Date:      Wed, 8 Jul 2009 12:31:56 +0200
From:      "Hans F. Nordhaug" <Hans.F.Nordhaug@hiMolde.no>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Second disks causes invalid partition when booting/no disks  found in sysinstall
Message-ID:  <20090708103156.GA22263@hiMolde.no>
In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20090707190954.02d6ce88@mail.pchotshots.com>
References:  <20090707215153.GA16007@hiMolde.no>  <4.3.2.7.2.20090707190954.02d6ce88@mail.pchotshots.com>

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* Brad Mettee <bmettee@pchotshots.com> [2009-07-08]:
> What happens if you put the drive on a secondary controller? (Maybe use the 
> CD-ROM drive cable)

OK, I tried it.

> With the drive on a separate cable, you should be able to avoid any 
> problems that cable select or jumpers may be causing.

It's the same problem. The old hard drive is detected as the secondary
slave by the BIOS, but I still get "invalid partition" when booting.

It's very frustrating. How can adding another drive make FreeBSD
detect none of the drives?

Before I tried putting the old drive on CD-ROM drive cable, I also
entered fixit mode from the LiveFS CD and ran "fdisk -B /dev/ad1"
(when only the old slave/drive was connected). It didn't make any
difference. What I really wanted to try was to remove the MBR
completely from the old slave/drive ...

Is there anything I can check/alter on the disks so I can use them 
at the same time ... Seperately the looked OK - the output from
fdisk and disklabel looked sane.

Regards,
Hans

> At 05:51 PM 7/7/2009, Hans F. Nordhaug wrote:
> >* Hans F. Nordhaug <Hans.F.Nordhaug@hiMolde.no> [2009-07-07]:
> >> Hi!
> >>
> >> I have been running FreeBSD happily for several years on the same old
> >> hardware. 2 weeks ago when I was on vacation one of the disks started
> >> to have problems, and 5 days ago the disk just stopped working - far
> >> too many read failures to get anything mounted. I got a new disk
> >> yesterday (finally home from vacation). The problems started when I
> >> tried to install FreeBSD 7.2 - I got "no disks found" from sysinstall
> >> all the time. The BIOS reported happily the new master and the old
> >> slave/hard drive. OK, I just disconnected the old slave and was able to
> >> install FreeBSD on the master. I was thinking/hoping that with the OS
> >> in place I should be able to read the old slave (which was one single
> >> UFS partition). Anyway, if I connect the old slave/hard drive I get
> >> "invalid partition" when booting - argh!
> >>
> >> What should/can I do? If I run the Live CD (livefs), I of course get
> >> "no disks found" ...
> >[cut]
> >
> >I did some more tests and:
> >
> >1) Using only the old slave/hard drive works - it's detected by
> >   sysinstall. (The new drive is disconected.)
> >2) I replaced the FreeBSD boot manager with the standard boot manager,
> >   but still the FreeBSD boot manager kicked in unless I disconnected
> >   the old slave. This seems to indicate that the old slave also has
> >   a FreeBSD boot manager installed...
> >
> >The next obvious step (to me) is to remove the FreeBSD boot manager
> >from the old slave. I guess I can do it with sysinstall, but how?
> >The data on the disk can not be lost... Is there other things I should
> >try?
> >
> >Regards,
> >Hans Nordhaug



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