Re: [Testbed-admins] Booting error in Customizing the Generic Image

["'Ryan Jackson'" <rdjackso@flux.utah.edu>]

* Cheng Cui <ccui1@tigers.lsu.edu> [091102 18:51]:
> My disk type under BSD is 'accd', so it is 'sda' under Linux. And I have
> successfully imageunzipped both FreeBSD and Fedora images into the disk
> partition 1 and 2, by using my DSK=sda.

Good, glad that worked for you (so far anyway).

> However, after re-read the partition in linux MFS, it seems not to have
> the expected /dev/sda{5,6,7,8}. My /dev has only 4 sda device files
> which makes me unable to "mount /dev/${DSK}5 /mnt", see:

> # ls -l /dev/sda*
> brw-rw----    1 root     disk       8,   0 Nov  2 18:27 /dev/sda
> brw-r-----    1 root     root       8,   2 Nov  2 13:16 /dev/sda2
> brw-r-----    1 root     root       8,   3 Nov  2 13:16 /dev/sda3
> brw-rw----    1 root     disk       8,   4 Nov  2 18:33 /dev/sda4

This is strange.  The kernel clearly recognizes your disk, and from
your dmesg output it initially sees a valid BSD disklabel on partition
1 with 5 sub partitions.  Then later it sees something entirely
different: only partition 4 with a bad BSD disklabel.  This doesn't
look right.

Did you rescan the partition table using the hdparm command or fdisk?

If you could do the following tests I think I should be able to figure
this out:

- Reboot into the admin MFS, capture the output of dmesg into a file,
  and send it to me.
- Write the generic image to the disk again but stop after you finish
  runing the imgunzip command.  Then run 'hdparm -z /dev/sda'.  Send
  me the output of that command (if any) plus any new dmesg output.
- Capture the output of '/sbin/fdisk -l -u /dev/sda' into a file and
  send it to me.

Thanks.