A Tale Of Two USB Pen Drives

Sat Sep 19 10:10:10 PDT 2020

On Sat, 19 Sep 2020 12:35:14 +0200
Vincent DEFERT <20.100 at defert.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> This should not happen:
> 
>  > da8: reading primary partition table: error accessing offset   
> 00000000000 for 512 byte

I never encountered this error.
It seems your issue is not the same as mine at this point.
I have something like a "timeout" but not this one.

> No wonder it can't find the root partition, then... :/
> 
> The image you downloaded night be corrupt, an error might have occurred 
> while writing it to the USB drive, or a setting in your BIOS might 
> prevent you from writing to the beginning of your disks.
> Checking your BIOS is the first thing to do.
> Then, you can download the disk image again, verify its checksum, dd it 
> onto your USB drive and wait until all data has been written (which is 
> really long with a USB 2.0 drive).
> And check the logs for errors during the write operation.
> 
> On 18/09/2020 23:30, Alexander Shendi wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > thanks for the reply
> > Here a few additional data points:
> > 1. The machine boots in UEFI-only mode. I have to "gop set 2" before 
> > booting. Still the same symptoms.
> > 2. The machine also boots in "Legacy" mode. Same symptoms.
> > 3. last few lines of output before "mountroot>" prompt:
> >
> > da8 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
> > da8: <USB DISK 2.0 PMAP> Removable SCSI-4 direct access device
> > da8: Serial Number 90008CE057A40545
> > da8: 40.000 MB/s transfer
> > da8: 29604 MB (60628992 512 byte sectors 255H 63 S-T 3773C )
> > da0s4: cannot find label (fixlabel: raw partiton offset != slice offset)
> > da8: reading primary partition table: error accessing offset 
> > 00000000000 for 512
> > byte
> > Mounting root fron ufs:part-by-label1/DragonFly.8.1.a
> > no disk naned 'part-by-label/DragonFly_5.8.1.a'
> > ffs_mountroot: can't find root
> > Root mount failed: 6
> >
> > 4. Specifiying
> > vfs.mountroot.timeout="10" or "20"
> > doesn't help.
> >
> > TIA for your help.
> >
> > Alexander
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Am 18. September 2020 22:42:30 MESZ schrieb Vincent DEFERT 
> > <20.100 at defert.com>:
> >
> >     FreeBSD has the following line in it's USB images /boot/loader.conf:
> >
> >     vfs.mountroot.timeout="10"
> >
> >     It may help to include it in DragonFly's.
> >
> >     On 18/09/2020 22:18, nacho Lariguet wrote:  
> >>     On Fri, 18 Sep 2020 21:02:51 +0200
> >>     Alexander Shendi<Alexander.Shendi at web.de>  wrote:
> >>  
> >>>     Dear list,
> >>>
> >>>     so yesterday I decided to try out Dragonfly BSD. So I booted OpenBSD 6.8-beta on my trusty Lenovo Thinkpad X220 and promptly downloaded the 5.8.1 release memstick image. I then used dd(1) to copy it to /dev/rsd1c and rebooted. I rejoiced that the image booted but was dismayed that it asked me to specify the root fs. Choices of da0 da0s4 and da8 were displayed. By subsequent use of "lsdev -v" at the boot prompt I determined that "da8" probably was the correct choice, with da0s4 being the OpenBSD partition, which I wanted to leave alone.
> >>>
> >>>     Use of "ufs:da8", "hammer2:da8", "ffs:da8" all gave an error reading sector 0 of the device.
> >>>     I thought that the pen drive might be defective and went to town to buy another one. That didn't help. Neither did using the current snapshot help.
> >>>
> >>>     I'm now at loss what to do. I like challenges and simply using the working OpenBSD installation won't do.
> >>>
> >>>     I would be grateful for any help, or pointers to any dics that I can RTFM. TIA.
> >>>
> >>>     Best Regards,
> >>>
> >>>     /Alexander  
> >>     I hit the same issue last month: all of my Kingston DataTraveller G3s (and I got a lot of them) left me at the boot prompt with the same message asking me to specify the location of the file-system. (see my attached image)
> >>
> >>     At first I suspected bad firmware on the Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny M715q I was attempting to boot into (from my experience IBM and Lenovo being the worst uEFI implementations I ever seen, full of bugs), but, after a while, it seemed evident it was not the firmware since every other liveCD I throwed at the machine booted flawlessly, that including even pfSense and, of course, many linux distros.
> >>
> >>     Try the following: when it asks for the fs and you don't see your drive listed, wait a couple of minutes (2+ minutes of my Lenovo) and probably you'll see kernel messages showing the drive detected after a while, at this point enter ? again and you'll see your boot drive (the USB key) listed, from then on, it is straightforward to boot the liveCD.
> >>
> >>     It is like the USB keys are not properly detected sometimes, or, detected but the kernel waits for something to complete, or whatever.
> >>
> >>     FYI: even after successfully installing dragonFlyBSD I came across the same issue every time I insert a Kingston USB key. I encounter this issue in uEFI mode, I don't now right now if it also pops up booting in BIOS mode.  
> >
> >
> > -- 
> > Ceci n'est pas un courriel.   
> 