*BSD News Article 4988


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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!utcsri!torn!cunews!revcan!sidus!zone4!andrew
From: andrew@zone4.ocunix.on.ca (Andrew Low)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Distribution: world
Subject: Re: 386BSD - Seems to stop my disks from booting...
References: <kjb.716286770@godzilla.cgl.citri.edu.au>
Message-ID: <9209139363@zone4.ocunix.on.ca>
Organization: Zone4
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 92 14:46:52 GMT
Lines: 29

In article <kjb.716286770@godzilla.cgl.citri.edu.au> 
kjb@cgl.citri.edu.au (Kendall Bennett) writes:
>120M Western Digitial 2120 hard disks (WDC AC2120M). 

IDE drives *should* be used in their native geometry, this often means
setting your BIOS up to have a user defined entry which is correct for
your particular drive.  Dos will work with this type of BIOS setting 
as well.

>Damn. I also worked out that if I do a shutdown -to386bsd, it puts the
>system back into the non-bootable state, and a shutdown -todos makes
>MSDOS startable again, but I have to load OS/2 2.0 from floppies to get
>boot manage to work again (using fdisk).

Sounds like the MBR (master boot record) is used by all three of these
operations.  'shutdown -to386bsd' puts BSD boot code there, the -todos
option tries to put MSDOS boot code there and the OS2 boot manager 
lives in the same place.

>Any clues pppplllleaaasssse?

Try using the 'newbootables' from agate.berkeley.edu, these worked
for me when the original 0.1 disks did not.  Something minor was changed
in the boot code I believe.  That and find out the native geometry of
your IDE drive, it might make all the difference in the world.

+/+\+/+\+/+chew carefully/+\+/+\+/+\+/+\+/+\+/+\+/+\+/+\+/+\+/+\+/+\+/+\+/+\+/+
Roo [andrew@zone4.ocunix.on.ca] m a c h i n e l o v e h a t e f e a r v o i d .
               "dreams are all that separate us from the machines"