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Re: Disk geometry error (Fag 14.6)
Thanks to your request for more info about my
hardware, I unscrewed the machine to find out. On the
hard disk label, it said it had 16383 (2^14 - 1)
cylinders. (Thank you flashlight!) In binary, that
would be 11 1111 1111 1111 cylinders. However, the
OpenBSD install program said I only had 5955
cylinders. In binary, that's 1 0111 0100 0011
cylinders.
That qualifies as a disk geometry error, doesn't it?
Is that all you need to know?
(In case not, I have a Pheonix BIOS and an AMD Athlon
Processor, and was trying to install OpenBSD 3.3. I am
currently downloading the intall packages for OpenBSD
3.4, though. It'll take awhile. Dial-up. I allocated
the first 2700 cylinders to OpenBSD. On the rest I was
going to install a operating system that's compatible
with Winmodem. Any suggestions on a secure operating
system that meets that requirement?)
btw - According to some Debian people I know, it's
called "hanging" whether it prints once and doesn't
move on or prints infinitely and doesn't move on.
--- Nick Holland <> wrote:
> yikes. Please wrape your lines, and otherwise beat
> on your mail
> program to make it work better.
Sorry, I probably accidentally told it to allow HTML
tags, which would cause it to ignore white space.
(Actually, this is web-based email, not a mail
program. I don't even know how a mail program works. I
find this more secure for my purposes. Besides, this
isn't my computer.)
>
> Venice Miazza wrote:
> >
(Note - This Faq 14.6 was ommitted from openbsd.org,
but can still be found
here:
tech.zone.ee/openbsd/faq/faq14.html#D0P3)
I've been trying to install OpenBSD on an i386
hewlett-packard that used to run Windows ME, which was
horribly insecure. Just when I thought I had finally
installed it correctly, and I rebooted, it printed the
following line over and over -
Using Drive: 0 Partition: 0
That makes sense - that's where I installed OpenBSD,
except it did that all night. After some initial
research and help from a friend, I thought it was a
BIOS incompatibility problem, and went into my BIOS
and changed the Large handle format thingy.
I still got the same error, even when I went through
the installation process all over.
Then after more research, I found that it was actually
a disk geometry error (see faq), and executed the
lines of commands it said to execute from the shell
that comes with floppy33.fs.
Still, I got the same error.
Then I realized the faq said I could get this error if
I changed my BIOS, so I changed that back to the
default and ran the commands again. I'm still getting
that error. What should I try now? (Please help?)
>
> That is, btw., a broken mirror. Hasn't been updated
> in over five
> months, apparently.
>
> The reason it was removed is because people were
> reading symptoms
> without understanding the reasons detailed in it,
> and it was causing
> more harm than good. The real probem was with the
> incompatable boot
> loader, which seems to have been fixed very nicely
> back in 3.1. Truth
> of the matter is, the reason this article even
> mentioned the drive
> geometry issue was that the OLD FAQ article on that
> topic claimed that
> was the reason, and as the first FAQ article I
> (re)wrote, I didn't
> quite want to tell my supervisor that the article
> that was there
> previously on this topic (which he may have wrote)
> was COMPLETELY
> wrong (and I still can not prove that a drive
> geometry problem NEVER
> caused a boot hang like that...but I doubt it. 8)
>
> If you read that article closely, it was about
> getting the message and
> a HANG, not a repeating message ("over and over") as
> you describe.
>
> Whatever you have going on, I do not think it is a
> drive geometry
> problem. Unfortunately, knowing nothing about your
> machine except
> some idea what the logo on the front of it might
> look like. It is
> POSSIBLE you have somehow got a corrupted MBR on
> your disk (how??), or
> maybe you have the one machine in the world that is
> incompatable with
> the OpenBSD MBR code. I'd start with following the
> advice in that old
> FAQ about using a DOS 6.x+ boot disk and doing an
> "FDISK /MBR". Don't
> know if it will fix your problem, but it will
> certainly change the
> symptoms (the "Using drive X partition Y" message
> comes out of the
> OpenBSD MBR code. If you do the DOS "FDISK /MBR"
> thing properly, you
> replace that code).
>
> Huh. Wonder if a BIOS "Virus protection" feature
> being enabled could
> result in a mangled MBR install...*might* explain my
> "how??" above...
>
> Get us some more info...
> http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq2.html#Bugs
> http://www.openbsd.org/report.html
> http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#getdmesg
>
> Nick.
> --
> http://www.holland-consulting.net
>
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