# 8.1 installer can't see partition table



## qwerty (Nov 28, 2010)

Hello

Having tried to install FreeBSD 8.1 I've encountered the following problem: although the hard disk is already partitioned and contains 2 primary and 1 extended partition, the "FDisk Partition Editor" shows nothing, as if all the space on the disk was unused.

Here's the raw partition table read from the first sector (MBR):

```
0001 0100 07fe ffff 3f00 0000 0df0 bf03
0000 c1ff 05fe ffff 4cf0 bf03 3449 8002
8000 c1ff a6fe ffff 8039 4006 730a 8002
0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
```

Here's the output from the NetBSD fdisk:

```
Disk: /dev/rwd1d
NetBSD disklabel disk geometry:
cylinders: 310101, heads: 16, sectors/track: 63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 312581808

BIOS disk geometry:
cylinders: 1024, heads: 255, sectors/track: 63 (16065 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 312581808

Partition table:
0: NTFS, OS/2 HPFS, QNX2 or Advanced UNIX (sysid 7)
    start 63, size 62910477 (30718 MB, Cyls 0-3915)
1: Extended partition (sysid 5)
    start 62910540, size 41961780 (20489 MB, Cyls 3916-6527)
2: OpenBSD (sysid 166)
    start 104872320, size 41945715 (20481 MB, Cyls 6528-9138), Active
3: <UNUSED>
Extended partition table:
E0: Linux swap or Prime or Solaris (sysid 130)
    start 62910603, size 1060227 (518 MB, Cyls 3916-3981)
        PBR is not bootable: All bytes are identical (0x00)
E1: Linux native (sysid 131)
    start 63970893, size 40901427 (19971 MB, Cyls 3982-6527)
First active partition: 2
Drive serial number: 519419138 (0x1ef5b502)
```

(note that LBA start sectors and partition sizes are correctly calculated according to the raw partition table).

The partition table is properly recognized under some other OSes: Windows XP, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, and even FreeBSD livefs from memstick.

The hard disk is Samsung SP1654N installed as IDE primary slave.
(by the way: will the install process on the primary slave affect in any way the primary master, assuming that I won't install any bootloader and will boot FreeBSD from GRUB?).

So my question is: what is going on?

Thanks in advance.


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## jem (Dec 6, 2010)

I saw this same issue when I tried to install FreeBSD alongside Windows 7 on my laptop.  You probably need to manually load the GEOM MBR class kernel modules.

You can do this from the menu when you boot the installation CD.  Choose the "Escape to a loader prompt" option, then do:

[CMD="OK"]load geom_mbr[/CMD]
[CMD="OK"]load geom_part_mbr[/CMD]
[CMD="OK"]boot[/CMD]


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## Beeblebrox (Dec 7, 2010)

Does this help any?
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=19069


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