Boot loader doesn't see ATA disk after successful install

Brian O'Shea b_oshea at yahoo.com
Tue May 10 17:27:40 PDT 2005


Replying to my own question with another question after some more
RTFM'ing...

--- Brian O'Shea <b_oshea at yahoo.com> wrote:
...
>                                     ... When I created the slice on
> disk1, sysinstall warned me that the geometry was incorrect.  Instead
> it used some other values that it considered to be more sane.  I have
> gone through the install twice, both with the same results.  The
> second time I looked up what the BIOS thought the geometry was, and
> specified that to sysinstall. ...

I just noticed this:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/troubleshoot.html#BOOT-READ-ERROR

So I rebooted the system again and in the fdisk partition editor
I re-entered the disk geometry values that I got from the system BIOS,
and pressed 'W' as the above web page suggests.  It then produced this
warning:

    WARNING: This should only be used when modifying an EXISTING
    installation.  If you are installing FreeBSD for the first time
    then you should simply type Q when you're finished here and your
    changes will be committed in one batch automatically at the end of
    these questions.  If you're adding a disk, you should NOT write
    from this screen, you should do it from the label editor.

    Are you absolutely sure you want to do this now?

I'm not quite sure what to do here.  Technically this is an existing
installation, but I've never been able to get it to boot from the disk
because the loader can not find the filesystem installed on it.  I'm
not too concerned about the data on the disk because it can be easily
re-installed.  I'm just being cautious because of that warning.  Is this
what I need to do?

TIA,
-brian


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