Jeremy David wrote: > Hi. Thanks for reading my post. I'm in the midst of a sticky > situation. I had an OpenBSD web-server running on an older desktop > computer. I decided to take the hard drives and move them into a newer > computer, one with more processing power, RAM, etc, because the > performance boost would be really handy. The old web-server was a real > clunker. When it got too many hits, it rattled. No really, audible and > visible rattling.
that would be the hard disk...and moving the rattling HD to another machine probably won't change much. Though softdeps might... > Anyway, I read up on how to do this, and my plan was basically to plug > the two hard drives into the new IDE slots in the newer box, reinstall > the boot blocks, and go to town. Here's what happens when I try to > boot the old hd0 (I removed the second hard drive for this to simplify > matters) without any bootable media in the floppy or CD-ROM drive. smart to go one drive at a time.. > Search for Boot Record fron CDROM..Not Found > Searching for Boot Record from Floppy..Not Found > Searching for Boot Record from IDE-0..OK > Using drive.0, partition 3. > Loading... > ERR M > > "ERR M -- An invalid magic(5) number was read in the second-stage > bootloader's header. This generally means whatever it was that was > read in was NOT /boot, usually meaning installboot(8) was run > incorrectly, the /boot file was altered, or you have exceeded your > BIOS's ability to read a large disk." > http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html This is actually a very rare situation anymore...really to the point of investigating why things went wrong, rather than just fixing it. > This is basically what I thought would happen. So, my plan was to > reinstall the bootblocks on the hd0 by following these instructions: > > " > 14.8 - Installing Bootblocks - i386 specific ... > # cd /usr/mdec; ./installboot /boot biosboot sd0 > "http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#InstBoot > > Only, here's what happens when I try that: > > Searthing for Boot Record from CDROM..OK > Loading...... > probing pc0 com0 apm mem[365K 159M a20=on] > disk fd0 fd1 hd0+ >>> OpenBSD/i386 BOOT 2.10 > boot>b hd0a:/bsd > booting hd0a:/bsd: open hd0a:/bsd: No such file or directory > failed(2), will try /obsd > > What can I do to get my system to boot? Note, I *have* backed up the > /var partition so I could just reinstall the entire OS, a few > packages, and drop the /var partition back in, but that seems like > cheating. I feel as if I can learn what's going on here, that I will > have learned something useful. Maybe it's just something very simple > that I'm overlooking. At any rate, do you have any advice? Tips? Easy > answers? Difficult answers? Any ideas will be appreciated. Well, the "ERR M" means something is at least strange, if not very wrong. Start with getting a dmesg out of the old machine, along with the output from "fdisk wd0" and "disklabel wd0". Now, boot from the new machine from CDROM or floppy, and get a dmesg, disklabel and fdisk output. After booting from the CDROM or floppy, can you mount the hard disk partitions? It is not difficult to install the boot loader from the CDROM (hint: mount / on /mnt, then adjust the /boot parameter on your command line properly), but I *really* don't recommend doing that until you find out what is going on here. Nick.
