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Date:      Sat, 21 Sep 2002 16:56:28 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Doug White <dwhite@gumbysoft.com>
To:        Pete French <pfrench@firstcallgroup.co.uk>
Cc:        stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Compaq Deskpro EN booting problem
Message-ID:  <20020921165408.D57425-100000@carver.gumbysoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <E17sKYD-00038d-00@mailhost.firstcallgroup.co.uk>

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On Fri, 20 Sep 2002, Pete French wrote:

> I moved a disk system from a Compaq AP400 workstation to
> a Deskpro EN - this consisted of a 4200 RAID controller and
> a set of discs.
[...]
> So last night we decided to scrub the redundant diagnostics partion and
> put 2000 back onto the whole of that first section of the disc.

Bad move. :-) You just erased your BIOS setup too.

> Its puzzling the hell out of me - what does the 'beep' mean from the
> boot manager ? How can removing one partitoon affect a completely
> differnt bit of the drive ?

It means it wasn't able to boot the partition since it couldn't find it.
That usually occurs when the geometry changes to a layout that is not
compatible with the BIOS.

The canonical solution is to:
1) zero out the front of the disk to wipe out the previous partition table
2) Use a DOS/win98 boot floppy and construct a new partition table with a
single DOS partition in it with fdisk
3) Crank up your install, delete the DOS partition and put your BSD
partition there

That usually gets things back to sanity.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite@gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org


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