"cg 0: bad magic number" (used to be Disappointed with version 6.0)

[Donald J. O'Neill]

On Saturday 11 March 2006 23:51, Peter wrote:

> > Are you doing this through sysinstall or are you manually running
> > fdisk
> > and bsdlabel.
>
> Through sysinstall.  Both disklabel and fdisk don't work.  The former
> gives "input/output error" and output to the latter I gave in my last
> post.
>
> >
> > Is this a brand new disk? Has it ever been used before? Is it still
> > under warrantee? If it is, take it back and get it replaced.
>
> Yeah, I'm leaning that way too.
>
> > Hey, I just saw it. You made Google search.
>
> Huh?

Yeah. Do a google search for Seagate ST3300831A, then search within for 
problems and there it is, at the bottom of the first page:
Google Group results for Seagate ST3300831A problem
	Disappointed in version 6.0 - list.freebsd.questions - March 11, 2006
	Seagate hard drive warranty - comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.stora ...

If you search for petermatulis, there are about 263 hits. It appears at 
one time you were doing OpenBSD. Just a piece of trivia. I can be found 
also. 
>
> > It looks to me like things just went through the motions and not
> > the actuality of installing ufs on the drive. That's happened to me
> > a couple of times and from what I remember, I had to start the
> > install over from the beginning - and I seem to recall something
> > about having
> >
> > to install windows first and reformatting all the hard-drives with
> > NTFS, then I could go back in and install FreeBSD. Otherwise, I
> > couldn't get FreeBSD to install, it just went through the motions,
> > wiping out whatever was on the hard-drives but not putting in
> > FreeBSD.
> > Without a CDROM, it's going to be a little bit rough to do.
>
> I don't understand why you mention Windows.  Surely I don't require
> Windows to get this drive to work.  As for the cdrom, I can always
> put it back to do an install.  It doesn't cause  trouble -just slows
> down the boot drive.
>
I had a hard drive one time that I just couldn't get FreeBSD to format, 
no matter what I did. I finally gave up and put WindowsXP on it, which 
was somewhat of struggle too. After that, since what I wanted was 
FreeBSD, I retried installing it, it worked this time, I don't know why 
but it did. I can only think that there was something wrong with the 
original installation of FreeBSD and I wasn't experienced enough, at 
that time to figure out what it was, other than it wasn't working 
right. If I'm remembering correctly, a while later the drive would 
operate intermittently and I put it in the basement.

> --
> Peter
>
Hi Peter,

Since you can play around a bit. Try reconnecting the CDROM and just the 
300GB Seagate on the other ata channel. Then see if FreeBSD will 
successfully install on the drive.

How much time do you have to work with this problem?

Don