Making a disk bootable...

[Ian Freislich]

Mark Murray wrote:
> Hi Ian!
> 
> Ian Freislich writes:
> > I've used fdisk to create one slice (da0s1).  I then used bsdlabel
> > to make make the partitions a, b, e and f.  Then to put the boot
> > block on 'disklabel -B /dev/da0s1' - if I 'disklabel -B /dev/da0'
> > it trashes the label.  Then I copy all my filesystems off the IDE
> > drive I'm trying to rid myself of onto the SCSI disk.  When I tell
> > the BIOS to boot off SCSI, it complains 'Missing Operating System'.
> 
> Then, when you fdisk, make damn sure that the probed geometry is used.
> After that, you shouldn't have probelms. If that fixes your problem,
> please report it in detail to phk at freebsd.org so we can get a more
> permanent fix.

I've just tried this dd'ing /dev/zero over the front of the disk
first to no avail (the probed geometry is the geometry that fdisk
used anyway).  I also tried your much loved ficticious geometry of
255H 64S and that didn't work.  It's a RPITA.  In the end I dangerously
dedicated the disk and that works.

Ian