HDD missing from sysinstall

[Modulok]

I had a missing hard drive on a FreeBSD box that had a single IDE
drive that was incorrectly jumpered. After I switched the jumper on
the disk controller, everything was correctly detected by the device
probe. (This shouldn't be an issue on SATA drives though.)

Something you might try before looking into hardware issues, is to use
a liveCD such as Freesbie (available in the ports collection
sysutils/freesbie), boot to the liveCD and use dd(1) to entirely
obliterate the first few sectors of the disk, nuking the the master
boot record. That is, if the device probe on the liveCD detects the
disk. (Perhaps use an older version.)

This will make any previous data on the disk inaccessible, but if a
really corrupt master boot record in concert with a funky BIOS are at
fault, this would resolve the issue. You could then use sysinstall to
install a new master boot record and so forth. The command would look
something like this:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=512 count=1
   # Nuke the master boot record. Replace 'ad0' with the appropriate device.
   # IMPORTANT: This will make the disk not bootable.

Just a thought.
-Modulok-

On 3/1/08, comperr <comperr at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just to add I am using an MSI P6N SLI plat. motherboard
>
> On Mar 1, 10:28 pm, comperr <comp... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > When I put in my fbsd 6.3 or 7.0 install disk sysinstall is unable to
> > detect any of the hard drives in my computer.
> >
> > This is includes SATA and IDE HDDs in varying orders.   BIOS is able
> > to detect the the hard drives.   I Previously had fbsd 6.2 installed
> > on them and the problem started when I upgraded the kernel to 6.3
> > although I don't see my upgrades relevance as I have tried to
> > reinstall from a clean disk since then.
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