Can't boot 4.3-R from SCSI - Solved!

Richard Smith rdls at satamatics.com
Tue May 1 13:52:27 BST 2001


On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 11:19:02PM +0100, Richard Smith wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 10:11:38PM +0100, Richard Smith wrote:
> > I am trying to upgrade an industrial PC from 4.2-R to 4.3-R using CDROM.
> > The PC has a 4G IBM SCSI disk on an Adaptec controller (pretty standard 
> > stuff).
> > 
> > Under 4.2-R the disk was "dangerously dedicated".
> > Under 4.3-R that is no longer an option.
> > 
> > I have tried a number of combinations...
> > 
> > 1) standard MBR + 4G partition => "missing operating system"
> > 
> > 2) boot manager + 4G partition => "F1 - FreeBSD" => long beep
> > 
> > 3) standard MBR + 1G + 3G partitions => "invalid partition table"
> > 
> > In (3) above, the root slice was in the first partition (which was less
> > than 1000 cylinders), I was grappling at straws by this time.
> > 
> > Could it be disk geometry? If so, where do I discover the correct values.
> 
> Having read the FAQ, I think I need to try turning off geometry translation
> in the SCSI BIOS. That'll give me something to do tomorrow ;-)

For those of you who are interested (you know who you are), it was
indeed geometry. The previously "dangerously dedicated" drives already
had a strange geometry. Once I forced sysinstall to re-detect the 
geometry (by feeding it an empty string), we were all hunky-dory again.

Richard

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