Hi to all. I have been interested in BSD for about a year and have tried all of the three most popular free ones.
I would like to start by saying something good: OpenBSD was a very pleasant surprise to me. After trying FreeBSD and NetBSD, I left OpenBSD to the end of the queue because of so many bad things I had heard about it, like "it's slow" or "it's too difficult". I didn't find any of this while testing it. Instead, this is my favorite BSD so far and I actually think I could use it every day instead of Linux. I also want to build a server, BTW. Now, the bad thing. Contrasting with the very good experience I had in my tests, I have already installed it three times because of a problem that beats the heck out of me. You certainly have heard about it before: disk: fd0 hd0+ >> OpenBSD/i386 BOOT 2.02 open(hd0a:/etc/boot.conf: Invalid argument boot> booting hd0a:/bsd: open hd0a:/bsd: Invalid argument failed(22). will try /obsd boot> booting hd0a:/obsd: open hd0a:/obsd: Invalid argument failed(22). will try /bsd.old My first line is different from "disk: fd0 hd0+" because I have three hard disks. And I guess it's not BOOT 2.02 anymore. I have OpenBSD 3.7. Actually, I copied the block above from the archives: http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/openbsd/2003-11/0143.html It was very sad. In the first time, I could boot with the cd: boot> boot hd0a:/bsd But I couldn't find out how to fix the system and boot without the CD. Reinstalling didn't work either. Neither did deleting and recreating the disk labels. Actually, even if I format the slice with another file system, the disk labels are still there when I try to reinstall. The only method that worked for me was the following: - Format the slice with another file system. In my case, ext2. - Boot into Linux and copy an awful lot of data to that slice until no space is left. - Boot with the CD and reinstall everything all over again. Yes, this method actually worked twice and had me piloting OpenBSD again. That's when I tested OpenBSD and found it so good. But it only survives about 4 or 5 reboots until that nasty problem bites me again. And in the last two times, booting with "boot hd0a:/bsd" didn't work either. Then I just gave up. What I have now is an unbootable slice. If I had actual data in there, I wouldn't know what to do to have it back. But what is also a very bad consequence is that now I am afraid of OpenBSD. All the time during my tests, I stared nervously at the boot sequence waiting for the strange problem to happen again. And, sure enough, it's happened three times already in less than two days. I really liked all the rest of the experience, but I don't think I'll have the courage to actually use it. I almost formatted the slice to install something else and left OpenBSD behind, but decided to take a shot and ask for a little enlightenment here. Back to that message I found in the archives, it seems that the person that signs as "herk" solved the problem with a BIOS update. Actually, I found another case in Google of someone who had the same problem and also solved the problem with a BIOS update. But I don't want to go that way. I do not feel comfortable at all updating my BIOS. Lots of things can go wrong and trash my motherboard. Besides, I really would like someone to tell me why that has to be the only way if: - I never had that problem with FreeBSD; - I never had that problem with NetBSD; - I never had that problem with Windows 95, 98 or 2000 (this machine never saw and never will see XP); - I never had that problem with any of the 10 or more Linux distros I have tried, over 30 if we count multiple versions of these 10 distros as individual distros. In light of these facts, what would the technical explanation be for such a discouraging flaw not to be viewed and addressed as a bug or, at least, a shortcoming of OpenBSD? Of course, alternative and effective solutions to my problem would be greatly appreciated, but for now I only beg that you gentlemen at least tell me, in very clear wording, why it is not considered a bug if it only seems to happen with OpenBSD. Many thanks in advance for your time and attention. -- Luciano Espirito Santo Santos, SP - Brasil
