On 03/26/14 16:59, Charlie Farinella wrote: > I'm trying to install OpenBSD 5.4 on a Dell Vostro 400, it's several > years old but not ancient. 4GB RAM, 250GB Seagate ST3250310AS hard > drive. The installation goes normally until it tries to find the > hard drive and then tells me no hard drive is available. > > I've wiped the drive (it had ESXi on it before), repartitioned it, > unpartitioned it, installed Linux, installed FreeBSD all without > problem, but no matter what I do to it, OpenBSD won't see it. > > I would really like to get this working so any suggestions or > guidance is very much appreciated.
First of all, your report sucks. Normally, I try to just ignore bad reports, even when I have a possible W.A.G., but I'm going to try something new... I'm going to say you owe the project a $50 donation if I'm right. And if I'm wrong, you get to buy the 5.5 CDs when they come out and say "ha ha! you were WRONG!" First of all, if you hooked the drive up properly and it is seen in the bios and all, it isn't a matter of the /drive/ not being recognized, or anything on the drive left over, there's something wrong with the handling of the drive by the interface. All that stuff that goes scrolling by the screen on boot? it's important. it's called the "dmesg". Read it, it will tell you why things didn't work. You may well have to interpret things, but somewhere on your dmesg, the chip that is your SATA interface will show up, and right there, it will probably give you a good idea why it isn't acting like a disk interface. And while it looks like gibberish, it's actually fairly readable. My wild guess: you have an ahci interface (this is good), configured in the BIOS for RAID (this is bad). Dell shipped a lot of machines with one disk, with the interface configured in the BIOS as a "RAID". This is really just a lame BIOS-assisted OS-based RAID system, like most cheap RAID options, but if the OS doesn't support the RAID idea and it is a multi-booting system, bad things can happen when the BIOS "helps" you by copying one drive over your other drive, so OpenBSD (and at least some Linux kernels, I've seen) won't touch the drive if it was in the unsupported RAID configuration mode. Nick.
