bsdlabel, now no boot

I was playing last night on my home FreeBSD system which is
the only  
machine there that has internet access. And did something
wrong.

Had added two new SATA HD's and was playing with gstripe,
adjusting  
the stripe size. Default 4k stripe resulted in a filesystem
that runs  
at only 10 MB/sec or so.

Had run gstripe, bsdlabel, and newfs, 4 or 5 times with
different  
stripe sizes when suddenly the old was gone and I couldn't
create a  
new. Nothing in /dev/stripe/. This is FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE
circa July  
2007. "OK, something is messed up, lets reboot."
Didn't do the usual  
"F1 FreeBSD" boot, fell back to a 0:ad(0,a)/boot/
prompt asking what  
to boot. I didn't *think* I was playing with the disk label
on the  
PATA drive where FreeBSD is supposed to boot but clearly
I've hosed  
something. Machine rebooted without problems earlier when
the new  
drives were installed.

Booted the 6.1-RELEASE CD from which this system was
originally  
installed. Fiddled with the FDISK and labeler sections and
didn't do  
any good. Didn't do any harm. My original partition table is
still  
there along with the BSD slices.

Wasn't getting anywhere with the CD so I installed a minimal
binary  
6.1 on one of the SATA drives (ad4s1). While I was there I
set mount  
points for the PATA drive ad0s1 under /old/. Told it to
write the  
FreeBSD boot manager and everything. This works. Still can't
boot the  
PATA drive. But have mounted the old partitions. Then
umounted and ran  
"dump -0af" for each old filesystem into dump
images.

The boot manager is back (at least on the SATA drive) as F1
for  
FreeBSD and F5 for another drive, but F5 beeps and doesn't
change.

Think I have tried all the boot options in fdisk and
bsdlabel, nothing  
seems to work.

Then tried sysinstall from the minimal 6.1 and used the
"Write" option  
under fdisk to flush my update right now to disk and
received an error  
that it could not write the disk. Nothing was mounted from
that drive.  
Got same sort of error in the slice editor.

I don't think my Dell PowerEdge 400SC has any sort of
protection for  
the MBR in BIOS. Will look again tonight.

Noticed the PATA drive was painfully slow under 6.1. Know I
had DMA  
enabled manually in loader.conf under 6.2 and wondering if
FreeBSD can  
write sector 0 via DMA but BIOS is blocking it if DMA is not
used?

Cutting to the chase, my Windows-style partition table is
sane (does  
the FreeBSD "partition" need to be marked
bootable?), and my BSD slice  
table appears to be reasonable and sane. But the drive is
not bootable.

"fdisk -B ad0" didn't hurt nor help. No error
message.
"fdisk -Bi ad0" didn't hurt nor help. No error
message.
"bsdlabel -B ad0s1" didn't hurt nor help. No error
message.

The only error messages have been in sysinstall running from
the 6.1  
minimal installation.

Is probably a good time for me to wipe this drive and
install 7.0, but  
now that I have reached that conclusion and have nothing
else to loose  
I'd like to learn how to recover from this situation.

--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkellyHiWAAY.net
============================================================

Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.

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bsdlabel, now no boot

Thread: bsdlabel, now no boot