A Tale Of Two USB Pen Drives

[Vincent DEFERT]

Hi,

This should not happen:

 > da8: reading primary partition table: error accessing offset 
00000000000 for 512 byte

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. 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20200919/95b282b3/attachment-0002.htm>