Making a disk bootable...

[Ian Freislich]

John-Mark Gurney wrote:
> Ian Freislich wrote this message on Mon, Jul 14, 2003 at 18:48 +0200:
> > 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.
> 
> One thing you might of been missing is making sure that the type in
> the disklabel was set properly.  For scsi, it must be SCSI, and for
> IDE it must be IDE or ESDI.  I had problems with this too.

I think all that stuff is no longer in the disklabel:

[brane-dead] / # disklabel /dev/da0s1
# /dev/da0s1:
8 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
  a:   262144        0    4.2BSD     1024  8192 32776 
  b:  1048576   262144      swap                    
  c:  8888924        0    unused        0     0         # "raw" part, don't edit
  e:  2097152  1310720    4.2BSD     1024  8192 46248 
  f:  5481052  3407872    4.2BSD     1024  8192 46248 

Ian