POS system trashing hard drives during install

[John McDonnell]

Just realized I replied directly instead of to the list. Sending this into the list this time.

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John McDonnell
mcdonnjd at pcam.org
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "John McDonnell" <mcdonnjd at pcam.org<mailto:mcdonnjd at pcam.org>>
Date: Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 6:41 PM -0800
Subject: Re: POS system trashing hard drives during install
To: "luzar722 at gmail.com" <luzar722 at gmail.com<mailto:luzar722 at gmail.com>>



From: Ernie Luzar
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 9:14 PM
Subject: Re: POS system trashing hard drives during install
To: John McDonnell
Cc: FreeBSD Questions

I would say your problem is with the hard drive and how its laid out. The POS pc being an older hardware system it uses the MBR (master boot record) formate. Freebsd 10.x releases do not use that format any more. Try doing a .iso cdrom install and this time do not take the hard drive default, instead select the MBR option. You can verify this as the cause by putting the 80gb H.D. you all ready installed 10.2 on into a newer pc that is running 10.0 or newer and it will boot ok. If I remember correctly the 7.x series defaulted to the MBR formate. There is one got ya, the HD you installed 10.x on is now formated with the new gpart boot formate. I do not know if the 10.x bsdinstaller MBR option will identify the HD has the gpart formate and issue the commands to delete that formate from the 80gb HD with 10.x installed on it You can run this little simple script called gpart.nuke to prepare the HD for MBR install method. #! /bin/sh echo "What disk do you want" echo "to wipe? For example - da1 :" read disk echo "OK, in 10 seconds I will destroy all data on $disk!" echo "Press CTRL+C to abort!" sleep 10 diskinfo ${disk} | while read disk sectorsize size sectors other do # Delete MBR and partition table. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/${disk} bs=${sectorsize} count=1 # Delete GEOM metadata. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/${disk} bs=${sectorsize} oseek=`expr $sectors - 2` count=2 done

Sorry for not inline posting, but I don't think I can do that on this mobile app.

As I mentioned, the last time I attempted to install FreeBSD on this machine, I did use MBR partitioning. And this was on a hard drive that I had verified had MBR partitions on it.

Though thinking back, I'm not sure I did a gpart destroy on the drive first, so the installer may have created a GPT container on it before I started. I've not had a chance to do anything with this today and won't be able to get back to it until tomorrow at the earliest and maybe not until next week.

My Windows PC that I was hooking the failed hard drives up to in order to check the drives should have been able to initialize and reformat the hard drive, but it wouldn't do that, but it may be an issue with the IDE to USB adapter I was using. (That machine does recognize GPT and actually has Windows installed that way.)

I'm thinking the easiest thing to do is going to be to put the drive in another PC and install there and then put that drive into my POS.

But feel free to offer other suggestions as I won't be able to get to this very soon.

--
John McDonnell
mcdonnjd at pcam.org
Sent from Outlook<http://taps.io/outlookmobile> Mobile