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List:       openbsd-tech
Subject:    Need help getting this darned OS on a partition and booted without
From:       Christopher Barry <cbarry () 2xtreme ! net>
Date:       1998-07-31 23:30:28
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Hi,

I've been using Linux for a good while now and have always wondered why
most free-OS using people use Linux instead of BSD including myself. So
I decided to give OpenBSD a try, and when trying to get the install to
work on about the tenth try I completely hosed most of my logical
partitions because during part of fdisk I wanted to quit from the
current MBR menu without saving and did 'quit' instead of 'exit' and
nuked a great deal of data accidentally. They really should make 'write'
the only command that will actually make changes permanent, and they
should prompt for a 'yes' answer to. Oh well, I've learned my lesson I
guess but anyways, I would still like to give OpenBSD a try, but am too
stupid to get it on my disk I guess by myself so I'll need some help.
Now here's my disk's information and what my disk looked like before I
nuked a lot of it:

Seagate Cheetah ST39102LW (niiiiiice disk :)
Geometry: C/H/S   1106/255/63 - 512 bytes per sector - 17,767,890
sectors total. It's 9.1GB(9097159680 bytes) or 8675.73MB.
OpenBSD only sees 1023 cylinders. As long as OpenBSD's inability to see
those uppermost cylinders doesn't lead to the destruction of data, I
really don't mind that it can't read/write that high.

Now this is how I had my drive partitioned before, and will have it
partitioned again just the same before trying another OpenBSD install:
(drives named using Linux device names)

partition  type id   size MB    size cylinders    comments

sda1       04        15.69MB       2                 DOS/primary
sda2       06       251.02        32               Win98/primary
sda3       05     ??(rest of disk, don't remember) extended part.

(from now on all partitions are logical and in the
 extended partition)

sda5       82       251.02        32               Linux swap
sda6       83       1019.75      130               Debian Linux /
free space          3059.25      390

(up until now I've created all my partitions at the
 beginning of free space. All partitions from now on
 I created at the end of free space because these are
 partitions I use for storing data that doesn't demand
 performance so they can go closer to the inside of
 the disk where transfer rates are slower)

sda7       06       1019.75      130               DOS/WIN data
sda8       06       1019.75      130               DOS/WIN data
sda9       06       1019.75      130  (was) My MP3 collection :(
sda10      83       1019.75      130  Linux files(only OS that
                                      can see past cylinder 1023)

I decided to create the OpenBSD partition at the end of the free space
and to make it 65 cylinders, 509.88MB. So the OpenBSD partition became
sda7 and all partitions above sda6 as seen above were shifted up one so
that sda11 was my final partition then. This may have been the first
mistake I made but I didn't quite trust myself with the OpenBSD fdisk so
I used Linux's cfdisk to make the type A6 OpenBSD partition, and forgot
to set it active but once I was in OpenBSD's fdisk again it seemed to
recognise the partition fine and I set it active then and all appeared
well.

Next came the disklabel part. I guess I understand the basic concept of
it that you make all of OpenBSD's partitions within the type A6
partition and set the type A6 partition's boundaries so that OpenBSD
only uses space within the type A6 partition. I set the boundaries based
on the data from above and then had 1,044,162 sectors available and I
made the sd0a partition 800,000 and made the sd0b swap partition use the
rest (244,162). All seemed to be going well from this point on and I
configured the network, nameserver, root password, blah blah... and
eventually the install stopped and I got an error message which as best
as I can remember was like:

mount_ffs: /dev/sd0a: device not configured

I kept redoing everything over and over and I could not figure out what
was up. Printing the disklabel information showed that there was indeed
a sd0a 4.2BSD filesystem partition and a sd0b swap partition, so I don't
understand what the hell I'm supposed to do to 'configure' them. I
downloaded all the tarballs from the 2.3/i386/ directory except for
games and stored them on the sda7 msdos partition from the table above
(which at this time was sda8 and if I remember correctly sd0n to
OpenBSD) and from the bootdisk I could do mount -t msdos /dev/sd0n /mnt
and see them fine and at one point when I was going through the install
script again and playing with the disklabel stuff some more OpenBSD did
the strange thing of unpacking all the tarballs to the Windows 98
partition and it kept going on even after running out of space, the
whole time complaining about being unable to set UID and later on
complaining about device out of space.

Finally I had been at this for God knows how long trying to get it to
install so I started playing with fdisk some more. The first 'loaded
MBR' (this is strangest, most cryptic way of looking at a partitioned
disk system, why can't it be more like linux or dos?) showed the 2
primary partions (0,1) and the extended(2). I did 'select 2' and it gave
me a list of 2 partitions, the first logical partition (linux swap) and
choice 1, extended. I kept choosing extended until I got to the OpenBSD
one. I had run out of ideas to try so I tried the 'reinitialize' option
and didn't like what I saw happened so I foolishly did 'quit' instead of
'exit' and saved the changes and what happened is it made the OpenBSD
partition use the rest of the disk space up to cylinder 1023,
effectively destroying all those logical partitions. When I try and use
Linux's cfdisk it spews at me: FATAL ERROR: Bad logical partition and
gives me no choice but to exit. My Linux install residing in a logical
partition located beneath the OpenBSD disaster still boots off the disk
just fine though and is what I am using to type this letter right now.
Trying to use DOS or Windows FDISK just starts an infinity loop where it
keeps trying to load it over and over and over again so I'm going to
have to move my existing data off disk and then low-level format it I
suppose with my SCSI controller's BIOS utilities and then I'll be able
to use cfdisk to repartition and then I can reformat and restore.

Anyways, given all the data above, do any of you see where I went wrong
or know what I need to do to stop those sd0a: device not configured
messages?

Since my disk will be repartitioned again exactly as above, all the data
is there to determine exactly how to perform the partitioning and
disklabel procedure for OpenBSD. If any of you could help, I would be
forever in debt.

Thanks very much in advance for any assistance,
Christopher Barry

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