On 2017-02-13 07:11, STeve Andre' wrote:
I'm puzzled and am asking for help. I'm attempting to install
the -current snapshot (feb 12) on a Dell precision t3500. The
install formats a 6T disk very quickly, like in 25 seconds. Hmm.
After installing the tar files, installboot fails with a
"Bad magic number in superblock". If I mount the a partition I
see real data. Changing to a 160G disk everything works & boots,
but not with the 6T disk.
The t3500 is a sata 2 machine, as is the 160G disk. The 6T disk
is sata 3, but since I see the OS written to the 6T disk it's been
written out OK so thats not it. I'm missing something with regards
the size of the disk? Probably I'm forgetting to include something
relevant but I've been dealing with this last night and am tired.
Clues?
You're missing the fact that a T3500 cannot boot off a disk larger than
2TB, because it supports legacy BIOS boot only, not UEFI. It is
possible you might occasionally get lucky but AFAIK the disk geometry
messes up the BIOS bootloader pretty much 100% of the time.
The Precision line didn't gain UEFI (i.e. >2TB boot disk support) until
the Tx6xx series, AFAIK.
If your T3500 has a UEFI boot option, then I'm wrong, and you should be
able to solve your problem by switching to UEFI.
In theory, creating a 2TB partition would be sufficient, but in practice
it usually isn't.
My solution to these problems is to leave a small USB stick permanently
installed and boot off that; the easiest way to manage that in OpenBSD
that I know of is to mount it at /boot and replace /bsd with a symlink
to /boot/bsd (after moving /bsd, of course). This will require some
manual work before rebooting off the ramdisk, naturally, and works IMHO
best if you use diskids instead of device paths.
-Adam
