Installation Problem - 8.0

[Anton Shterenlikht]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 03:54:26PM -0500, Mister Itanium wrote:
> I'm hitting another DEAD wall.
> 
> I finally got to the installation screen, it detects the HD, but "FreeBSD
> DiskLabel Editor" is not able to WRITE/CHANGE anything on the HDD.
> 
> This is what I get when I try to WRITE something on the disk:
> 
> ===============================================
> *ad0: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA retrying (0 retries left) LBA=0
> GEOM: ad0: corrupt or invalid GPT detected.
> GEOM: ad0: GPT rejected -- may not be recoverable.*
> ===============================================
> 
> And then I get a message saying it can't wirte on ad0 disk etc..
> 
> 
> Question number 1:
> *Any suggestions/help on resolving this?*
> 
> Question n.2:
> *How do I disable ACPI on boot on IA64 machines?
> *
> 
> Thanks a lot!
> 
> PS: HDD works fine under Debian Linux, using fdisk I'm able to
> change/delete/add partitions without a problem, which makes me think it's
> not a hardware issue.

Try booting from livefs disk and wipe the disk
clean. Choose Fixit shell, and do something like

	if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=1m

This helped me in the past. However, in my
case the disks were SCSI (da). IIRC I had
very similar problem installing on Alpha
ATA and SCSI disks.

anton

-- 
Anton Shterenlikht
Room 2.6, Queen's Building
Mech Eng Dept
Bristol University
University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR, UK
Tel: +44 (0)117 331 5944
Fax: +44 (0)117 929 4423