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Date:      Fri, 27 Oct 2000 11:14:14 -0700 (PDT)
From:      John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com>
Cc:        hackers@FreeBSD.org, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.org, Danny Braniss <danny@cs.huji.ac.il>, Paul Saab <paul@mu.org>
Subject:   Re: Really odd "BTX halted" problem booting FreeBSD on VALinux h
Message-ID:  <XFMail.001027111414.jhb@FreeBSD.org>
In-Reply-To: <200010271803.e9RI3wK05949@earth.backplane.com>

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On 27-Oct-00 Matt Dillon wrote:
>:Danny Braniss (danny@cs.huji.ac.il) wrote:
>:> In message <200010270746.e9R7k5k00392@earth.backplane.com>you write:
>:> }    This is really weird.  I have two valinux rackmount boxes, duel cpu's.
>:> }
>:> }    I was testing the PXE stuff and booting one of the boxes regularly.  
>:> }    All of a sudden every time I reboot I get:
>:> }
>:> 
>:> i've seen the same, i just reboot it, and it works. sometimes, while
>:> the kernel is doing it's init stuff it panics. i haven't seen it fail
>:> more than once in a row, so i was thinking maybe some network error
>:> that was not dealt properly. btw, the boxes are DELL.
>:
>:He was not seeing a PXE bug, it was a loader issue with the BIOS.
>:The PXE bug you are seeing is with anything build 078 or earlier.
>:Intel has a bug in their rom which they fixed back in March of this year.
>:
>:-- 
>:Paul Saab
>:Technical Yahoo
> 
>     Right.  It isn't PXE.  PXE works fine. 
> 
>     I'm starting to figure out what is going on.  If I create a
>     'dangerously dedicated' parittion, the BIOS drops dead when the
>     loader tries to scan it.
> 
>     If I create a normal fdisk partition, the BIOS works, but disklabel
>     will not let me label the fdisk partition and I have no clue as to why
>     not!
> 
>     fdisk -I da0              (init a real freebsd-dedicated DOS partition)
>     reboot                    (reboot just to be sure)
>                               (BIOS does NOT crash with a real dos partition
>                                       table)
>     fdisk da0                 (see output below)
> 
>       The data for partition 1 is:
>       sysid 165,(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
>           start 63, size 143363997 (70001 Meg), flag 80 (active)
>               beg: cyl 0/ sector 1/ head 1;
>               end: cyl 731/ sector 63/ head 254
>       The data for partition 2 is:
>       <UNUSED>
>       The data for partition 3 is:
>       <UNUSED>
>       The data for partition 4 is:
>       <UNUSED>
>       10:/root# 
> 
>     disklabel -w -r da0s1 auto        (label it)

Disklabel can not label slices.  For a project I had to work on receently
I hacked up a slicelabel tool that used libdisk (which can handle slices)
to initialize the disklabels in slices.  The code for the slicelabel
command is quite short:

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <libdisk.h>
#include <paths.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

static void     usage(void);
static void     label_disk(const char *name);

static void
usage(void)
{
        fprintf(stderr, "Usage: slicelabel disk [disk ...]\n");
        exit(1);
}

static void
label_disk(const char *name)
{
        struct disk     *disk;

        if ((disk = Open_Disk(name)) == NULL)
                fprintf(stderr, "Unable to open disk %s.\n", name);
        else
                Write_Disk(disk);
}

int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
        int     index;

        if (argc == 1)
                usage();

        for(index = 1; index < argc; index++)
                label_disk(argv[index]);

        return(0);
}

-- 

John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> -- http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
PGP Key: http://www.baldwin.cx/~john/pgpkey.asc
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!"  -  http://www.FreeBSD.org/


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