5.4 Installer + Promise FT100TX2 = Loader crash

[Mark Kirkwood]

Mark Kirkwood wrote:
> Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, 29 Jun 2005 15:57, Doug White wrote:
>>
>>> Try:
>>>
>>> . Zero off the first megabyte or so of the subdisks with dd or similar
>>>  tool.
>>> . Force an array initialize from the controller BIOS. Wait for it to
>>>  finish.
>>> . Install some other OS that recognizes the array, write the MBR and
>>>  partition table, then install FreeBSD over it.
>>>
>>> Some controller BIOSen have been known to peek at the DOS partition 
>>> table,
>>> and it may be jumping off into space if its seeing half a table from one
>>> disk, or something like that. These actions should blow away any bogus
>>> underlying data.


This is what I tried, essentially following the bsdlabel(8) man page 
(the 2 underlying disks are ad4, ad6, system is 6.0-CURRENT 20050624):

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4 bs=512 count=20480
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad6 bs=512 count=20480
$ fdisk -BI ad4
$ fdisk -BI ad6
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad4s1 bs=512 count=20480
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad6s1 bs=512 count=20480
$ bsdlabel -w -B ad4s1
$ bsdlabel -w -B ad6s1

Then rebooted and there is no change in behavior. (I have not tried 
installing another os, as I only have Linux as an alternative, and 
suspect that will do no better job of normalizing the mbr and partition 
table than the above)