The quick summary is that, with 7.2-RELEASE AMD64 DVD on the Intel D945GCLF2, disks seem to only be able to be made and identified as "bootable" once -- after which any any changes (while booted from the DVD or another drive) using sysinstall or fixit tools (or gpt or gpart) seem to result in the drive not being identified by the BIOS as bootable, with no clear method to recover.
I know these boards will run with an existing i386 drive that has gone from 7.0-RELEASE to 7.2-RELEASE using freebsd-update.
These boards will boot from the DVD and identify as an amd64 kernel (with all four cores active).
On the rare occasions I've gotten a recognized FreeBSD install on a hard drive or USB stick, it has run the amd64 kernel and binaries.
Two different MBs and five different drives, on PATA, SATA, and even UMASS have exhibited the same symptoms.
The BIOS has been updated to the latest (and, as delivered, is newer than that referred to in other posts here), with no change in behavior.
I have not been able to determine a reliable path to getting that sysinstall-created successful install once the drive on the board has been "broken" -- this includes
One "curious" thing, that I don't remember seeing in my history with FreeBSD going back to the 3.x releases (when "buildworld" took a day if the phase of the moon was right) is that
Is this something seen now, or could this be part of the cause?
TIA,
jef
I know these boards will run with an existing i386 drive that has gone from 7.0-RELEASE to 7.2-RELEASE using freebsd-update.
These boards will boot from the DVD and identify as an amd64 kernel (with all four cores active).
On the rare occasions I've gotten a recognized FreeBSD install on a hard drive or USB stick, it has run the amd64 kernel and binaries.
Two different MBs and five different drives, on PATA, SATA, and even UMASS have exhibited the same symptoms.
The BIOS has been updated to the latest (and, as delivered, is newer than that referred to in other posts here), with no change in behavior.
I have not been able to determine a reliable path to getting that sysinstall-created successful install once the drive on the board has been "broken" -- this includes
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=512 count=1M
(excessive, but I even let it write the drive overnight with no count limit, in case there was something I didn't know about on the drive) and# fdisk -Bi
(which does not mark all partitions as "unused" as I would expect from the man page) and deleting all slices and partitions in sysinstall or sade. I've given up on trying to use gpt or gpart until I can just get a "normal" install to be reliable.One "curious" thing, that I don't remember seeing in my history with FreeBSD going back to the 3.x releases (when "buildworld" took a day if the phase of the moon was right) is that
dmesg is persisting through reboots,
even when booting from DVD. Is this something seen now, or could this be part of the cause?
TIA,
jef