Re: Similar problem to "Lost ability to boot" dated Jan 2002

[Luis Cerdas <luis.cerdas@rawtenla.com>]

I am sorry, in the hurry I forgot the machine info...

The machine is a 1U rackmount chassis, PIII 733 Mhz, 256 MB RAM, 20 GB 7200
rpm IDE HD (it is one of the firewall/DMZ boxes available from eRacks.com).
It is running a fresh 3.0 install from an official December CD.  The root
partition is in fact over 8 GB (OS partition, swap partition, overlap [?]
partition).  The entire disk is used for OpenBSD.

The thing is, after the initial install, the generic kernel has not been
replaced, moved, or otherwise (so in theory, the LargeDrive issues should
not yet be present).

Before any flames, though, I do realize we should be separating the root
partition and possibly others (/usr, /var, /usr/local) and recompiling a new
kernel specific for our boxes; however, due to the urgency of this
deployment, this was not possible before the deployment.  True that we have
learned that it is better to tell our customers to wait a little, but
nevertheless we would like to know what could have caused this.

BTW, the machine hangs right after the Boot 1.28 recognizes "boot: fd0 hd0"
and the slash freezes; at this point all disk activity stops.  It seems as
though it is searching or waiting for something that doesn't exist.  If the
BIOS settings pointed to SCSI booting, I think this would be the cause,
however the BIOS is set for CD (IDE) and Primary HD (IDE) boot (currently in
that order).

The installboot was done once we got it to continue booting from the hard
disk after we booted from the CD.  The command used was based on the one
available in the FAQ:

cd /usr/mdec; ./installboot -v /boot biosboot wd0

and it finished without errors.  We have four other boxes that are installed
the same way, but have not developed the problem.

Luis C.


> You didn't provide many details.
> 
> I'm guessing you are running OpenBSD 3.0 (the Boot 1.28) and i386 (IDE
> drives and users of most other platforms usually remember that is
> relevant).
> 
> Would this happen to be a system with a / partition bigger than 8G?
> Or / that extends past the 8g point?  If so, check out:
> http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#LargeDrive
> 
> If this isn't it, provide some info.  Lots of info.  dmesg.  fdisk
> output. disklabel output.  how you did the installboot, what the
> output was.  Exactly what was on the screen when it hangs. etc.  You
> have something different between your machine and our machines that
> work, you need to tell us what...
> 
> Nick.
> -- 
> http://www.holland-consulting.net