sysinstall under 5.2-RELEASE guessed my geometry wrong. I have a 6gb WinXP partition and a 32gb FreeBSD partition. After upgrading from 4.9-STABLE (including requesting BootEasy), the system failed to boot. I was able to boot from CD and set currdev to load the 5.2 installation, and install BootEasy w/ boot0cfg, but not to get the system booting correctly -- with BootEasy, F2 for FreeBSD just beeped, although the WinXP installation was accessible. sysinstall chose a good geometry for this system from 4.5 through 4.9, but not booting from 5.2 disc 1. sysinstall 5.2 guessed 4865/255/63, which didn't work. fdisk inside 5.2 claimed 77545/16/63. pfdisk suggeted 1023/240/63, which worked for sysinstall when entered manually. Note: http://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/4-STABLE/installation/i386/trouble.html #4.2.2 claims sysinstall can determine the geometry from a 'DOS partition' at the beginning of the disk, but that didn't work for me. I will write up another PR for documentation issues associated with this problem. Fix: Make sysinstall smarter, if possible. Additionally, improve the documentation on disk geometry (next PR). Offer a method for fixing a usable FreeBSD installation without reinstalling. My system was bootable and looked fine, except boot code was missing. Presumably there is a way to install boot code for FreeBSD (for BootEasy to load) without reinstalling from scratch, but I was unable to find it. This is obscure, but would have been useful. How-To-Repeat: Install from 5.2-RELEASE CD on an HP Pavilion with 40gb WD disk, accepting sysinstall's (incorrect) geometry.
Further information: FreeBSD's fdisk comes up with these values, which don't correspond to sysinstall's guess or the values I copied from pfdisk to sysinstall to reinstall. fdisk comes up with the same values both with a non-booting system (booted from CD) and with a good system, booted normally from BootEasy. Chris Pepper >guest# fdisk >******* Working on device /dev/ad0 ******* >parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are: >cylinders=77545 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl) > >Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1 >parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are: >cylinders=77545 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl) > >Media sector size is 512 >Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1 >Information from DOS bootblock is: >The data for partition 1 is: >sysid 11 (0x0b),(DOS or Windows 95 with 32 bit FAT) > start 63, size 12579777 (6142 Meg), flag 0 > beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1; > end: cyl 831/ head 239/ sector 63 >The data for partition 2 is: >sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD) > start 12579840, size 65575440 (32019 Meg), flag 80 (active) > beg: cyl 832/ head 0/ sector 1; > end: cyl 1023/ head 239/ sector 63 >The data for partition 3 is: ><UNUSED> >The data for partition 4 is: ><UNUSED> -- Chris Pepper: <http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/> Rockefeller University: <http://www.rockefeller.edu/>
State Changed From-To: open->feedback Hello Chris, Can you tell me whether this problem still persists in later versions of FreeBSD? Thanks in advance
Responsible Changed From-To: freebsd-i386->remko grab the pr
State Changed From-To: feedback->suspended Feedback was not received, but my belief from looking through the mailing lists is that this is probably still a problem.
Responsible Changed From-To: remko->freebsd-bugs
Responsible Changed From-To: freebsd-bugs->randi Taking this.
State Changed From-To: suspended->open This is still a problem.
Responsible Changed From-To: randi->brucec Grab.
Responsible Changed From-To: brucec->freebsd-sysinstall Back to the pool.
sysinstall has been replaced by bsdinstall in FreeBSD 9.x. Closing.