# Partitions not being recognized properly?



## murias (Feb 8, 2009)

I really do hope someone can at least just point me in the right direction here.

It seems as though my system(s) are not recognizing the partitions after installation, and thus will not boot.

Motherboards are GA-6VTXDR-C with dual P III 866.  (yes, old).  I have 6 of them and 12 HD's, all HD's are the same Maxtor 300GB.  These machines were running FBSD 6.1.  It is my job to get these to be all identical.  There were different partitioning schemes and various RAID cards installed.  It is now up to me to make them all identical, exact replicas of each other so to speak.  --Been at this now for about three weeks, and I am not getting paid by the hour.

These boxes are supposed to be dedicated to FBSD, no win of any kind installed, or ever will be running.

I am installing off of the 7.1 iso dvd.  I can get the install going and completed without a problem.  Very smoothly as a matter of fact.

The problem comes when rebooting into FBSD, after install.  I get the following:

error 1 lba 392987935
no /boot/loader

After poking around the net, I have tried the following:
0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel
and
0:ad(0,a)/boot/loader
this do nothing.  It still results in a boot prompt.

My actual root partition is: /dev/ad0s1a
fstab reflects this also.
Booting up off of the dvd I have gone into this drive and everything is in /boot and compares nicely to the install dvd.

I did try something just for giggles.  took one of the drives plugged it into another i386 box, completely different hardware.  This got me to at least being able to get to a mountroot> prompt and after mounting root, seemed to work.  And then after altering fstab to point to the proper root, would still get me the same mountroot> prompt after a half a dozen reboots.  And any dd of this drive will not boot anything else.

I hope that someone out there can assist.  

Thank you all very much in advance.
Cheers
Murias


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## trev (Feb 9, 2009)

If the drive works with another system, then this is looks like a
BIOS/drive compatibility issue. Unfortunately the FreeBSD bootcode has to use the BIOS to read disk blocks, since the kernel isn't running yet.

Have you tried upgrading the motherboard BIOS of the miscreant systems to the latest version?


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## J65nko (Feb 11, 2009)

It could have something to do with the 137GB max disk size limit of the pre-ATA 6 specification. Before ATA-6 the maximum nr of bits used to do LBA was 28 bits. With 512 byte sector size the maximum addressable size was
	
	



```
2^28 = 268,435,456 sectors
268,435,456 * 512 = 137,438,953,472 bytes
```
Your disks are 300 GB and thus would need to use the 48 bit LBA from ATA 6.

The number of your error message





> error 1 lba 392987935


 lies beyond the reach of a 28 bits number:

```
392,987,935
268,435,456 = 2^28
```
Maybe Trev can confirm which condition triggers that "*error 1*" message.


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