Re: "Invalid partition table" after installation

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 06:36:14AM -0600, John wrote:
On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 08:16:59PM +0800, Fbsd1 wrote:
John wrote:
On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 10:25:26PM +0800, Fbsd1 wrote:
John wrote:
On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 04:38:22PM +0800, Fbsd1 wrote:
John wrote:
I've tried the "modern BIOS" geometry and the "255 head" geometry.
I've ensured that the first slice (boot slice) is smaller than 1.5
Gb. I've tried to figure out what the BIOS thinks the geometry
is, but it doesn't seem to want to tell me. At least, I can't find
it in the BIOS menu anywhere. When I boot from the CD-ROM with
the 255 head geometry, though, it complains about the disk geometry,
saying 16h,63s != 255h,63s or something like that - it flies by
pretty fast (is there a way to go back and see that from the CD-ROM
"boot only" boot?).

I'm using the "Standard" boot manager, and the entire disk is devoted
to FreeBSD.

System
BIOS version PT84510A.86A.2004.P05
Processor Type: Intel Pentium 4
Processor speed: 2.20Ghz

Memory: 512Mb

Disk: Primary IDE Master ST380021A (Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80Gb)
Primary IDE Slave: IOMega ZIP 250
Secondary IDE Master: Sony CD-RW CRX19 (what I boot from to install)
Secondary IDE Slave: DVD-ROM DDU1621

Boot sequence:
1) ATAPI CD-ROM
2) Hard Drive
3) "Removable Dev."

"Modern BIOS" geometry: 155061/16/63 for ad0
"calculated" geometry: 9729/255/63 for ad0

ad0s1 start=63, size=2875572
ad0s2 start=2875635, size=10217340
ad0s3 start=13092975, size=143203410
unus start=156296384, size=5103

ad0s1a / 384Mb
ad0s1d /usr 1Gb
ad0s2b SWAP 1Gb
ad0s2d /tmp 384Mb
ad0s2e /var 512Mb
ad0s2f /var/mail 2Gb
ad0s2g /usr/ports 1Gb
ad0s3d /home/mysql 4Gb
ad0s3e /home 50Gb
ad0s3f /usr/src 3Gb
ad0s3g /usr/obj 3Gb
ad0s3h /extra 8483Mb

Suggestions, please? I'm making zero headway right now. :(
What version of FreeBSD are you running????
Well, yes, I suppose that would be a good bit of information!

What I'm *TRYING* to run is 8.0. It seems to install successfully
(of course - after doing all that), but then when I try to boot
from the hard drive, I see an otherwise-blank screen that says:


Invalid partition table


and that's as far as it goes!

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There are reports of this sort of thing caused by 8.0 fdisk when doing a
install from scratch over a hard drive that all ready has an older
version of Freebsd installed on it.

The solution is to force the scratching of the MBR on the disk first
before running sysinstall fdisk.

Boot a LiveFS CD, then at a root prompt do:

sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 and:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adx oseek=1 bs=512 count=1

where x equals your drive number.

OK. I did exactly that. I confirmed that the second 512 bytes were zero
by doing a dd if/dev/ad0 bs=512 count=2 | od -c
and everything from 001000 through 002000 was zero.

But I still got "Invalid partition table" after the installation.

I guess I should set up one of my other systems as a local mirror.
I've done the installation so many time already, and it looks like
I'm not done yet!

On the 8.0 fdisk/MBR subject.
Doing dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adx oseek=1 bs=512 count=1 was the
solution from another post to the list with subject 'SunFire X2100
fails'. Here is another post that gives more details
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=322687+326879+/usr/local/
www/db/text/2009/freebsd-questions/20091227.freebsd-questions

It seems in 8.0 gpart was introduced and a change was made to fdisk to
support its sector o mbr format. 8.0 fdisk and disklabel are now broken.

Searching the list archives may shed more light on your problem.

Hmmm. This seems to describe a case where fdisk fails to change
the slice table. That is definitely not my case. The changes
certainly get made. The next time I go to retry the installation,
it has the information I gave it the previous time. I suppose it is
possible that it is putting it (and reading it) in the wrong location,
which is why the MBR throws up.

The problem is that I have a finite (and smallish) amount of time
in which to solve this. It seems like the most expedient route
forward at this point may be to try to install 7.2 and see how
that goes.

OK - well, I just tried with 7.2. I got exactly the same results.
After what seems like a successful installation, I try to boot from
the hard disk and get "Invalid partition table." Should I try Boot
Manager? Could that make a difference? Is it possible that this
combination of BIOS, processor, disk drive, etc., just isn't going
to to do for me? I can't just keep throwing hours at this problem.
--

John Lind
john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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