POS system trashing hard drives during install

[John McDonnell]

Apologizing in advance if the formatting of this gets all out of whack. Don't have a handy way of doing a copy and paste from up here where I have an old system with PATA connectors. So I'm typing by hand on my phone. Though, thinking about it now, maybe I should have done this from the POS since it will boot the XP disk. Maybe it will show something different. Anyway, here goes:

root@:~ # gpart show ada0
=>          63  78165297  ada0  MBR  (37G)
              63  40965687  1         ntfs [active]  (20G)
40965750  37190475  2         ebr  (18G)
78156225           9135             - free -   (4.5M)

=>             0  37190475 ada0s2  EBR (18G)
                 0  37190475             1 ntfs  (18G)

=>           63  78165297 diskid/DISK-5JVXZE4S  MBR  (37G)
                63 40965687                                        1 ntfs [active]  (20G)
  40965750 37190475                                        2  ebr (18G)
  78156225          9135                                        - free -  (4.5M)

=>             0  37190475  diskid/DISK-5JVXZE4Ss2  EBR  (18G)
                 0  37190475                                       1  ntfs  (18G)

That looks like a pretty normal layout to me. Guessing that there might be something special inside the MBR itself or something in the "empty" sectors. Is there some other command than "gpart show" that would be helpful?

--
John McDonnell
mcdonnjd at pcam.org
Sent from Outlook<http://taps.io/outlookmobile> Mobile



On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 11:08 AM -0800, "John McDonnell" <mcdonnjd at pcam.org<mailto:mcdonnjd at pcam.org>> wrote:

> -----Original Message-----
> On Thu, 17 Dec 2015, John McDonnell wrote:
>
> It took some looking to find this description of the problem in the post.

Sorry, I do tend to ramble on a bit.

> Some systems do stupid things based on what they find on the hard disk.
> Lenovo and IBM before them did this, for example.  Still do, in some cases.  It
> is not just a GPT thing, they did stupid things with MBR partitions also. The

I completely forgot about this. I have run across that issue with the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads before. When imaging the 300 some laptops the first time, we ran into issues because it wasn't copying some part of the boot blocks and I then learned about the /ib switch in Ghost which solved the issue with those laptops. (And also later with DeepFreeze.) Hopefully we can get this figured out so I can use FreeBSD on these systems.

> idea that old systems can't boot from GPT is incorrect.  GPT has the PMBR, a
> backwards-compatible MBR booting mechanism.

I actually did know this, but conveniently had forgotten about that. So it shouldn't be an issue with GPT itself, except that the system itself is probably looking for something specific in the MBR or on the disk...

> Some systems require a system partition for the BIOS.
>
> Given that this is a custom system, there might be some kind of security
> information stored on the drive.

It is looking like this might be the case. I had a chance to install FreeBSD onto another hard drive from another machine and had it up and running and then brought it over to one of the same model POS machines I have sitting in my office and tried to boot it up and it just locks up after detecting the hard drives and won't enter the BIOS.

> If it were me, I would use gpart to look at the partitioning on the XP drive.  It
> is likely MBR, but the number, type, and size of partitions could be a clue.

The XP drive is definitely MBR and not GPT. I should be able to get the info on that drive from gpart a little later this afternoon if things stay quiet.

Since this is locking up again like my old drives were, I'm wondering if I pop it back into the other PC if it will recognize it again or if it will fail. I'm hopeful that it will recognize it as that would mean that my various 80 GB drives may still be alive and just need a better interface than the IDE to USB adapter I was using at home. (I had been planning on using those hard drives in a couple of Playstation 2s.)

Thank you for your help so far. :)

--
John McDonnell
mcdonnjd at pcam.org
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