nanobsd-based installation on Soekris net4801 (disk geometry problem)

Denis Fortin fortin at acm.org
Sun Sep 11 13:38:00 PDT 2005


A quick question:

This weekend, I have decided to reinstall my Soekris net4801 since the 80GB 
disk in it, after running continuously for almost 3 years now, has reported 
a few read errors last week.  So I promptly decided to replace the disk.

I didn't have another FreeBSD machine to build a new nanobsd configuration, 
so I used the nanobsd package at 
http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/nanobsd/soekris_4x26 to put on a 64MB flash 
card that I had handy, and I added sysinstall to it.

This boots fine, and allows me to run the installation properly.

However, the resulting system will not boot from the disk, since I cannot 
figure the right geometry for the Fujitsu MVH2060AT 60GB drive.  The 
documentation says the drive reports 16383/16/63, the Soekris boot screen 
reports "Xlt 1024-255-63", fdisk recommends "7296/255/63" because it claims 
not to like the "116280-16-63" that it finds on the disk...  Sigh.  Bottom 
line is that the installation appears to work, but I am unable to then boot 
from the harddisk (the boot loader complains it cannot find /boot/loader).

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Denis F. 



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