When converting a SCSI disk from dedicated to FreeBSD with a single partition to multiple slices, sysinstall leaves the OLD label on the disk. Sysinstall reads and writes the new information but O/S fails to boot because it is still reading the old, invalid table. Fix: Once I determined what was going on, I worked around the problem by doing a dd of /dev/zero to the disk and then re-doing the install. I suggest that when the user deletes a slice from sysinstall, the operation should be performed immediately, unlike creates which can be deferred. How-To-Repeat: Using sysinstall, dedicate the entire disk to FreeBSD. I was doing newfs and s/w installs of minimal config but that should not matter. Reboot from floppy and allocate 2 slices of approximately equal size. Problem occurs with both standard MBR and the FreeBSD boot manager (the boot manager will simply beep when you hit F1). Sysinstall will permit you to install s/w again but when you reboot after the second install, up comes the dreaded "Missing Operating System" Going back in w/ sysinstall will show the NEW information, even though the MBR is using the OLD info. To see what is actually being used on the disk, boot the fixit floppy and disklabel -r sd0
On Wed, 23 Feb 2000 18:56:02 PST, wayne@staff.msen.com wrote: > When converting a SCSI disk from dedicated to FreeBSD with a single > partition to multiple slices, sysinstall leaves the OLD label on the > disk. Sysinstall reads and writes the new information but O/S fails > to boot because it is still reading the old, invalid table. Are you able to verify that this is a problem in the current FreeBSD 4.0 RELEASE CANDIDATE? Sysinstall's maintainer is under quite a lot of pressure at the moment with the upcoming release, and if you could check this on the 4.0 branch, I'm sure it'd be a massive help to him. Ciao, Sheldon.
This problem is still present in 4.0 RELEASE. Unfortunately, I did not re-examine the open PR database prior to my last FreeBSD conversion so I got bit by it again today. So I have a completely installed and configured system ready to go, that will not boot. Is there any possibility of getting this into 4.1 RC? It should be a fairly simple fix to either zero the prior contents of blocks 1 & 2 on the disk before writing the partition table and boot blocks or to simply zero all contents of the old partition table when writing a non-dangerously-dedicated one. /\/\ \/\/
Responsible Changed From-To: freebsd-bugs->murray Murray, could you take a look at this one? I don't remember a fix going in for it, and it's quite a nasty.
Responsible Changed From-To: murray->eric Eric is the man
Responsible Changed From-To: eric->freebsd-qa assign idle sysinstall bugs to freebsd-qa, as suggested by murray
Responsible Changed From-To: freebsd-bugs->brucec Take.
Responsible Changed From-To: brucec->freebsd-bugs Back to the pool.
Responsible Changed From-To: freebsd-bugs->freebsd-sysinstall sysinstall PR.
sysinstall has been replaced by bsdinstall in FreeBSD 9.x. Closing.