Everyone who gets useful tech support from this list should feel obligated to donate something to the project. Especially if a Dev took his time to help you; http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/ports/geo/openbsd-developers/files/OpenBSD
On Wed, Mar 26, 2014, at 10:52 PM, Nick Holland wrote: > 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.
