Second disks causes invalid partition when booting/no disks found in sysinstall

[Brad Mettee]

What happens if you put the drive on a secondary controller? (Maybe use the 
CD-ROM drive cable)

With the drive on a separate cable, you should be able to avoid any 
problems that cable select or jumpers may be causing.

At 05:51 PM 7/7/2009, Hans F. Nordhaug wrote:
>* Hans F. Nordhaug <Hans.F.Nordhaug at hiMolde.no> [2009-07-07]:
> > Hi!
> >
> > I have been running FreeBSD happily for several years on the same old
> > hardware. 2 weeks ago when I was on vacation one of the disks started
> > to have problems, and 5 days ago the disk just stopped working - far
> > too many read failures to get anything mounted. I got a new disk
> > yesterday (finally home from vacation). The problems started when I
> > tried to install FreeBSD 7.2 - I got "no disks found" from sysinstall
> > all the time. The BIOS reported happily the new master and the old
> > slave/hard drive. OK, I just disconnected the old slave and was able to
> > install FreeBSD on the master. I was thinking/hoping that with the OS
> > in place I should be able to read the old slave (which was one single
> > UFS partition). Anyway, if I connect the old slave/hard drive I get
> > "invalid partition" when booting - argh!
> >
> > What should/can I do? If I run the Live CD (livefs), I of course get
> > "no disks found" ...
>[cut]
>
>I did some more tests and:
>
>1) Using only the old slave/hard drive works - it's detected by
>    sysinstall. (The new drive is disconected.)
>2) I replaced the FreeBSD boot manager with the standard boot manager,
>    but still the FreeBSD boot manager kicked in unless I disconnected
>    the old slave. This seems to indicate that the old slave also has
>    a FreeBSD boot manager installed...
>
>The next obvious step (to me) is to remove the FreeBSD boot manager
>from the old slave. I guess I can do it with sysinstall, but how?
>The data on the disk can not be lost... Is there other things I should
>try?
>
>Regards,
>Hans Nordhaug
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         Brad Mettee
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