On Sat, Jan 20, 2024 at 10:34:25AM +0100, Jan Stary wrote: > You should need to dd anything as a part of installation,
I think you meant 'should NOT'. > and zeroing out a disk will surely not fix you booting problem. Agreed, in this case it's very unlikely to be necessary or useful to zero out the disk. Occasionally it's possible to encounter a BIOS which doesn't like particular things in the MBR or whatever, and hangs at boot time when it accesses a disk that has such an MBR. In those cases, zeroing out the MBR on another machine is a useful procedure. In almost all other install problem cases it is not. Additionally, for the benefit of the list archvies, we should clarify that we're talking about dd'ing zeros across the disk here. There are other valid reasons that you might want to write _random_ data across the whole disk as part of a new installation. So this is _not_ a case of, 'any install instructions that involve using dd are automatically wrong'. > No. If you're having beginner problems, start with > a dedicated machine where nothing matters and practice there. The OP said that he uses his 'favorite OS', (which I am assuming is OpenBSD), on a firewall, so presumably he is not a complete beginner. If possible, I would do a full install of OpenBSD to a USB drive on another machine, then try to boot that on the laptop. If it works, then we can easily get dmesg output, etc, and start to diagnose the real problem. > In particular, don't bring other OSes into it. Agreed.
