Installing on a PC164LX

[Wilko Bulte]

On Sat, Feb 24, 2007 at 04:57:24PM +0100, Steven Moix wrote..
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm relatively new to FreeBSD and have a serious installation problem  
> on my PC164 box: I can't slice/label my disk.
> 
> At boot I can see that my disk is recognized (a SCSI disk on a  
> Symbios Logic controller, nothing special here):
> ...
> da0 at sym0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
> da0: <SEAGATE ST39216N 0010> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-3 device
> da0: 20.000MB/s transfers (20.000MHz, offset 16)
> da0: 8761MB
> ...
> 
> When I follow the standard FreeBSD installation procedure as  
> explained in the handbook I simply can't initialize my disk. As I  
> understand, there is no fdisk-step on the alpha architecture, so I  
> should directly use disklabel to create my partitions. The problem is  
> that my disk doesn't show up in the usual disklabel selection  
> area...any clue why? The disk is perfectly visible on a RedHat/Gentoo  
> Linux installation so it isn't a hardware problem.

Most likely there is an old disklabel of some sort (can be Tru64, VMS,
or Linux) already on the disk.  Try zero-ing the beginning of the disk,
something like 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 count=10 bs=1m' will typically
do it.  If you subsequently boot from the FreeBSD install CD you will
most likely have better luck.

-- 
Wilko Bulte				wilko at FreeBSD.org