Re: Problems with 170MB HD (FreeBSD 6.0)

[Christian Wurst]

 install as without swap on 10GB drive withour touching this 170MB at all.


 then (after booting installed system)

 dd if=/dev/zero bs=512k count=1 of=/dev/your_170MB_whole_disk (like
 /dev/ad1)

 and

 swapon -a /dev/ad1


 if it works - put

 /dev/ad1 none swap sw 0 0

 in /etc/fstab

Thanks for the reply. I did as you described above:

# dd if=/dev/zero bs=512 count=1 of=/dev/ad1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes transferred in 0.01something secs

... which looks good I'd say.

But the swapon command returned a warning message:
WARNING: reducing size to maximum of 67108864 blocks per swap unit

I wasn't sure if that is ok. As a simple test I unpacked a rather big
tarball and hoped the system would swap. Eventually it did try to swap
it seems, because I got a lot of the following error messages from
ad1:

ad1: TIMEOUT - WRITE retrying (0 retries left) LBA=2152
ad1: FAILURE - SETFEATURES SET TRANSFER MODE
status=51READY,DSC,ERROR error=5ABORTED,ILLEGAL_LENGTH

These messages are repeated a number of times with different values
for LBA, finally it stops with

swap_pager: I/O error - pageout failed; blkno 292, size 28627, error 5

Could this be because I didn't tell the system the correct geometry
settings and it still thinks I have a 18863/255/63-disk?
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Problems with 170MB HD (FreeBSD 6.0)

[Christian Wurst]

Hello,

I've been trying to install FreeBSD 6.0 on an old Pentium MMX 200MHz
this weekend. The box  has two HDs, a ~10GB one, which I wanted to use
for / and a really old ~170MB one, which I wanted to use for swap. (Of
couse there would be enough space on the first disk for swap, but I
had this old disk lying around here and thought why not use it.)

I booted up from CD and started creating slices on the HDs, which
worked perfectly for the primary master HD (the 10GB one). But
sysinstall complained about an incorrect geometry setting for the
170MB drive and asked me to enter them manually. I didn't want to
reboot to get the BIOS values and tried to finish the install without
swap at all - which worked.

I rebooted, got the geometry settings for the disk from the BIOS,
started sysinstall and enterered them in fdisk using the (g)eometry
command.
The detected geometry is 18863 cyls/255 heads/63 sectors, which adds
up to a 144GB disk according to fdisk. After I enter the correct
values (903 cyls/8 heads/46 sectors), it tells me, the disk has 162MB,
but still shows me 144GB unused space. If I now use the a-command to
use the whole disk, it assignes the 144GB to ad1s1. That seems really
odd to me, I'd expect it to create a 162MB slice only. If I (w)rite
the changes, it tells me the partition was created sucessfully and
ad1s1 shows up in the label editor too. When trying to create swap
space in the disklabel editor, I get the error message: Unable to add
/dev/ad1s1b as a swap device: No such file or directory.

As far as I can tell I did exactly as described in the FAQ at
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/formatting-media/index.html.
From a search with Google I learned that some other people had the
problem with the wrong drive geometry too, but it seems to me that
they all have *much* larger drives and are trying to set up
multiboot-systems. Both drives worked well under Linux, so I think
it's no hardware-problem.

Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Chris
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