Hi. Thanks for reading my post. I'm in the midst of a sticky situation. I had an OpenBSD web-server running on an older desktop computer. I decided to take the hard drives and move them into a newer computer, one with more processing power, RAM, etc, because the performance boost would be really handy. The old web-server was a real clunker. When it got too many hits, it rattled. No really, audible and visible rattling.
Anyway, I read up on how to do this, and my plan was basically to plug the two hard drives into the new IDE slots in the newer box, reinstall the boot blocks, and go to town. Here's what happens when I try to boot the old hd0 (I removed the second hard drive for this to simplify matters) without any bootable media in the floppy or CD-ROM drive. Search for Boot Record fron CDROM..Not Found Searching for Boot Record from Floppy..Not Found Searching for Boot Record from IDE-0..OK Using drive.0, partition 3. Loading... ERR M "ERR M -- An invalid magic(5) number was read in the second-stage bootloader's header. This generally means whatever it was that was read in was NOT /boot, usually meaning installboot(8) was run incorrectly, the /boot file was altered, or you have exceeded your BIOS's ability to read a large disk." http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html This is basically what I thought would happen. So, my plan was to reinstall the bootblocks on the hd0 by following these instructions: " 14.8 - Installing Bootblocks - i386 specific Older versions of MS-DOS can only deal with disk geometries of 1024 cylinders or less. Since virtually all modern disks have more than 1024 cylinders, most SCSI BIOS chips (which come on the SCSI controller card) and IDE BIOS (which is part of the rest of the PC BIOS) have an option (sometimes the default) to "translate" the real disk geometry into something that fits within MS-DOS' ability. However, not all BIOS chips "translate" the geometry in the same way. If you change your BIOS (either with a new motherboard or a new SCSI controller), and the new one uses a different "translated" geometry, you will be unable to load the second-stage boot loader (and thus unable to load the kernel). (This is because the first-stage boot loader contains a list of the blocks that comprise /boot in terms of the original "translated" geometry). If you are using IDE disks, and you make changes to your BIOS settings, you can (unknowingly) change its translation also (most IDE BIOS offer 3 different translations). To fix your boot block so that you can boot normally, just put a boot floppy in your drive (or use a bootable CD-ROM) and at the boot prompt, type "b hd0a:/bsd" to force it to boot from the first hard disk (and not the floppy). Your machine should come up normally. You now need to update the first-stage boot Loader to see the new geometry (and re-write the boot block accordingly). Our example will assume your boot disk is sd0 (but for IDE it would be wd0, etc..): # cd /usr/mdec; ./installboot /boot biosboot sd0 "http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#InstBoot Only, here's what happens when I try that: Searthing for Boot Record from CDROM..OK Loading...... probing pc0 com0 apm mem[365K 159M a20=on] disk fd0 fd1 hd0+ >> OpenBSD/i386 BOOT 2.10 boot>b hd0a:/bsd booting hd0a:/bsd: open hd0a:/bsd: No such file or directory failed(2), will try /obsd What can I do to get my system to boot? Note, I *have* backed up the /var partition so I could just reinstall the entire OS, a few packages, and drop the /var partition back in, but that seems like cheating. I feel as if I can learn what's going on here, that I will have learned something useful. Maybe it's just something very simple that I'm overlooking. At any rate, do you have any advice? Tips? Easy answers? Difficult answers? Any ideas will be appreciated.
