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Boot error - Bad Magic



After reading the FAQ countless times, searching google, asking in
comp.unix.openbsd.misc and quizing the minds of local user groups I'm
finally going to resort to this mailing list. I know it's not meant to
help with installation problems but I'm having real difficulty finding the
answer.

My situation is that I've just bought a new 80GB hard drive and wish to
install OpenBSD on part of it. I have another hard drive that is used to
run Windows XP and Linux and I use lilo as a boot manager. I'm constrained
by the fact that I don't wish to use the whole disk on OpenBSD, I need
extra storage for Windows use too.

I've installed OpenBSD and reconfigured lilo to point to the correct
partition on the hard drive in order to boot the OpenBSD installation.
However when I try to start it up I get the "Bad Magic" error.

I've tried eliminating all the errors I can, my bios is up to date,
everything is within 1024 cylinders, / is definitely within acceptable
bounds. The only thing I can suspect is a problem with my configuration of
the partition and disklabel. One thing I can't do is boot the system using
the boot disk and boot hd1a:/bsd at the boot prompt. This makes me think
that I'm doing something stupidly wrong.

Below is the output of fdisk and disklabel for the drive in question. The
only problem I can think of relates to a comment made in INSTALL.linux
whereby wd1a should be aligned on a cylinder boundary (i.e. no *). I can't
work out how to get it to align properly and the changed that I'd need to
make in fdisk and disklabel to align it so.

I'd be grateful for your help with this. Like I said I'm more or less
driven as my last resort to this mailing list to help with my installation
problems,

Thanks,

James

Disk: wd1	geometry: 10337/240/63 [156295440 Sectors]
Offset: 0	Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending       LBA Info:
 #: id    C   H  S -    C   H  S [       start:      size   ]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*0: A6    0   1  1 - 1023 239 63 [          63:    15482817 ] OpenBSD
 1: 00    0   0  0 -    0   0  0 [           0:           0 ] unused
 2: 00    0   0  0 -    0   0  0 [           0:           0 ] unused
 3: 00    0   0  0 -    0   0  0 [           0:           0 ] unused

# /dev/rwd1c:
type: ESDI
disk: ESDI/IDE disk
label: WDC WD800JB-00CR
flags:
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 63
tracks/cylinder: 16
sectors/cylinder: 1008
cylinders: 16383
total sectors: 156301488
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0		# microseconds
track-to-track seek: 0	# microseconds
drivedata: 0

16 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize   cpg]
  a:   204561       63    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16 	# (Cyl.    0*- 202)
  b:  1572480   204624      swap                      	# (Cyl.  203 - 1762)
  c: 156301488        0    unused        0     0       	# (Cyl.    0 - 155060)
  d:   409248  1777104    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16 	# (Cyl. 1763 - 2168)
  e:   409248  2186352    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16 	# (Cyl. 2169 - 2574)
  f:  4194288  2595600    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16 	# (Cyl. 2575 - 6735)
  g:  8692992  6789888    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16 	# (Cyl. 6736 - 15359)

--
James Davis           \        james.davis@st-peters.ox.ac.uk
St. Peter's College     \   it-support@st-peters.oxford.ac.uk
PGP Key ID : 0x7E1F718A   \  http://users.ox.ac.uk/~spet1067/