DragonFlyBSD

:Hi there,
:
:I installed DF 2 days ago (the 1.12.1 release). I've choosen a primary partition for the installation (/dev/hda2 in linux slang) and installed the bootlocker on ad0.
:
:After the reboot my laptop hung immediately. I couldn't even see the BIOS password dialog anymore. Whenever I try to reach my bios setup via F2 it crashes on the way.
:
:Without the harddisk it is possible to boot the notebook without any problems.
:
:I bought an external HD case and tried to mount the HD with a live CD: no partition table...
:
:I can't find any reports for that issue, so I thought I will let you know.
:
:Do you need any further information about my hardware?
:
:And is there a way to recover the table?
:
:greets from Germany.
:
:HennR

Usually boot hangs are due to ide disk translation issues and BIOS mode
     settings for IDE disks, but I'm afraid I can't really help much.  The
     installer wasn't really designed for multi-boot systems.

-Matt
                    Matthew Dillon 
                    <dillon@backplane.com>

Hi.

I also think that the boot hanger is an acer BIOS specific problem.

But that my partition table was wrong recreated is in my opinion the fault of the installer! As I wrote I even can't mount the HD within an external case with a linux live cd.

HennR

I had the very same problem [1] with a Bullman laptop. I need to pass
"-C" to fdisk (which is the default on FreeBSD). This also means that
you have to install manually. Would be nice to be able to tell the
installer to use option -C.

Greets from Germany as well ;-)

Michael

[1]: http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2007-08/msg00062.html

Didn't I want to change the default back to -C? I think it is very bad t=
o create a slice table which hangs some machines.

cheers
simon

Yep, but I think Matt was against it. I wouldn't change the default
itself, but instead modify the installer to use -C by default (or at
least make it an option).

Regards,

Michael

:Simon 'corecode' Schubert wrote:
:> Didn't I want to change the default back to -C? I think it is very bad t=
:> o create a slice table which hangs some machines.
:
:Yep, but I think Matt was against it. I wouldn't change the default
:itself, but instead modify the installer to use -C by default (or at
:least make it an option).
:
:Regards,
:
: Michael

Using -C will break more things then it will fix.  Hard drives
    have been large enough to overflow the CHS fields for years now, 
    and wrapped values can confuse the hell out of bioses probably even
    worse now verses using all 1's.

-Matt
                    Matthew Dillon 
                    <dillon@backplane.com>

Agreed. But it is desireable for those of us that have screwed bioses,
to be able to install DragonFly on it without the need to perform all
the installation commands by hand (fdisk, cpdup etc.), just because
the installer does not pass "-C" to fdisk.

I'd like to see a "options for fdisk" setting in the installer, in the
same way as you can specify options to newfs (at least in FreeBSD).

Regards,

Michael

How does linux' cfdisk/fdisk handle it? How does Windows do it? I guess they don't smash the slice table, so we should take a look there, I'd say.

cheers
simon

I don't know. FreeBSD just has -C as default. The fdisk from NetBSD has
only little code in common with FreeBSD's fdisk. And NetBSD's version
also doesn't have this problem (it seems to determine the correct values).

Regards,

Michael

I think to do this properly we need to augment the installer in a
non-trivial way by having it detect whether the current partition
table is using wrapped values or not, make the detected mode the default,
but also let the user change it before completing that step.

Detection of wrapped mode could be added to fdisk fairly easily. 
    The installer work would probably take a day.  I've got my hands full,
    I can't do it, so we need a volunteer.

Dave Hayes has done all the hard work of bringing the installer into
    our CVS tree so it's all right there in /usr/src/usr.sbin/installer.

-Matt
                    Matthew Dillon 
                    <dillon@backplane.com>

To add some input:

FreeBSD wraps values
NetBSD wraps head + sec, sets cyl to 1023
Solaris sets cyl to 1023, sec to 63, head to 254 (!)

I think the NetBSD way seems reasonable. Unless somebody can point me to hard
evidence that setting values to all 1's is required, I'll make the change soon.