Using 'incorrect' HD geometry.

Jon Falconer jfalconer at puc.edu
Thu Mar 16 23:56:01 UTC 2006



On Thu, 16 Mar 2006, John Murphy wrote:

> Thanks Lila, your success encouraged me to try and you were quite right
> that "your win partition is pretty safe with freebsd fdisk."
> 
> Unfortunately the install failed saying:
> 
> Write failure on transfer! (wrote 77187 bytes of 1425408 bytes)
> 
> And loads of errors like the following were shown on the Alt F2 screen:
> 
> /stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error
> /stand/cpio: warning: skipped 723757 bytes of junk
> /stand/cpio: : No such file or directory
> /stand/cpio: invalid header: checksum error
> /stand/cpio: warning: skipped 4096 bytes of junk
> /stand/cpio: : No such file or directory
> [...]
> acd0: FAILURE - READ_BIG HARDWARE ERROR asc=0x08 ascq=0x03 error=0
> 
> I tried leaving the partitions (within the ad0s2 slice) as they were
> first.  Then I tried 'Auto defaults for all' and lastly some partition
> sizes of my own.  I even tried installing 5.3 which only managed to
> write -1 bytes.  Which is odd because it must have worked before.
> 
> Presumably I would need to change the drive geometry in fdisk to the
> figures which the BIOS indicates.  Any one know the implications of
> doing so for the non bsd slices?
> 
> Thanks again.
> 
> -- 
> John.
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John,

I had a similar problem while installing FreeBSD on an old HP NetServer.
It looked like a hard disk problem but it turned out to be the CD drive
could not read the install CD very well. Changed CD drives and everything
was fine. The message about write failure I guess is due to layers of
scripting not being able to pass back enough information.

Jon



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