Re: 3.2 Install doesn't see Seagate HDD

Hi,

Thanks for the replies about this problem! Please bear with me for another email about it as I haven't solved it yet, and I've become quite adament now about doing so with the current setup...

To Steve Shockley:

>> It says the drive is of type 0, and it correctly recognises [.....]

>Isn't type 0 usually "no drive installed"?

You're right. I meant to say: "mode 0"
Type would be 47 (after drive model #46, they stopped putting the characteristics of every available hard disk in every bios.)

>> - If I connect the system to a 880Mb Quantum disk, it fails to boot at all,

> That's either suspect hardware, or a board that doesn't support >512mb

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Right, the fact that the drive is >512 mb is probably the problem here. In the mean time, I've used this disk in the system where it came from (a Compaq Deskpro 575) to install FreeBSD 4.7 on it, which went flawless.

>> - I searched with Google to see if the Seageate ST3290A was the problem,

> Can you disable DMA in BIOS on either machine? What happens to the 880mb

I've searched the bios of the machine on which I want to install OpenBSD, but there I can't disable dma. The other machine was already installed with another os (freebsd.)

To Geoff Sweet:

> Back in the day when we started passing such disk storage limits as

This sounded very credible, so what I did is I started the low-level hdd format utility in the bios. Or at least, that's what I think I did. I got as far as selecting the drive (c), then I started the 'pre-format' tool, which was quite noisy and took about thirty minutes. I couldn't find the 'format' utillity, which I presumed was the program that would succeed 'pre-format' logically.
Reboot: bios still said "Primary master, type 0, CHS, 261MB", and bios autodetect still runs smoothly. CHS stands for "cylinders, heads, sectors" I presume.

I went on to boot OpenBSD 3.2 from floppy. On the line where it used to say disk: fd0 fd1 hd0*
It now said
disk: fd0 fd1
Then it waited for about one minute, then it added hd0*
And continued normally.

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When I confirmed that I wanted to install OpenBSD, It still didn't find the hard drive.
And fdisk still didn't work.
Sigh.

To Dan Heaver:

> The other thing to check is can your bios handle the size of the disk ?

The disk is 261 Mb large. The bios should be able to handle this. I think the bios in question only starts to have problems with >540 Mb drives.

Once more, to Steve Shockley:

>> Back in the day when we started passing such disk storage limits as

> Good point, those utilities replace the boot sector of the drive with their

Is there any way I can make sure any 'makebelieve' disk utillities aren't the problem?

Can we help you?

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cheers,

Bert Received on Fri Nov 22 12:55:59 2002