Installing on a PC164LX

[Steven Moix]

Thanks Wilko and Rod, this was a good tip on what could happen...

I ended up booting my linux CD (CentOS 4.2 Alpha), went to the  
console, did a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 count=10 bs=1000, ran  
fdisk /dev/sda and created a BSD disk label. Now it shows up fine  
when I start the FreeBSD installation. You saved my day :)

Steven

On Feb 24, 2007, at 5:39 PM, Wilko Bulte wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 24, 2007 at 04:57:24PM +0100, Steven Moix wrote..
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm relatively new to FreeBSD and have a serious installation problem
>> on my PC164 box: I can't slice/label my disk.
>>
>> At boot I can see that my disk is recognized (a SCSI disk on a
>> Symbios Logic controller, nothing special here):
>> ...
>> da0 at sym0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
>> da0: <SEAGATE ST39216N 0010> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-3 device
>> da0: 20.000MB/s transfers (20.000MHz, offset 16)
>> da0: 8761MB
>> ...
>>
>> When I follow the standard FreeBSD installation procedure as
>> explained in the handbook I simply can't initialize my disk. As I
>> understand, there is no fdisk-step on the alpha architecture, so I
>> should directly use disklabel to create my partitions. The problem is
>> that my disk doesn't show up in the usual disklabel selection
>> area...any clue why? The disk is perfectly visible on a RedHat/Gentoo
>> Linux installation so it isn't a hardware problem.
>
> Most likely there is an old disklabel of some sort (can be Tru64, VMS,
> or Linux) already on the disk.  Try zero-ing the beginning of the  
> disk,
> something like 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 count=10 bs=1m' will  
> typically
> do it.  If you subsequently boot from the FreeBSD install CD you will
> most likely have better luck.
>
> -- 
> Wilko Bulte				wilko at FreeBSD.org