hi, all, This should be an hardware issue, I've used an usb external drive with success. whith a dell A6 or A7 version of Dell bios, boot usb enabled, with a (double-usb) eternal drive, using BSD4.2 filesystem.
so maybe you need a bios upgrade or a double-usb-drive to be able to boot or to use BSD4.2 fs on / ? > ---------------------------------------- > From: Michael Treibton <[email protected]> > Sent: Sun Aug 07 12:32:45 CEST 2011 > To: <[email protected]> > Subject: installing OpenBSD 4.9 to external USB harddisk: Disk does not boot > > > Hi all, > > i'm attempting to diagnose if there was a problem with installing > OpenBSD to an external USB hard disk or not. The disk is a Western > Digital 2TB disk, should it matter. Needless to say, the install went > fine on to the disk; all the sets were unpacked, and I rebooted the > machine as per the instructions at the end. During install, I let the > installer auto partition the disk in question, and that ended up > creating a sensible layout that i could tell. > > Yet, when i reboot the machine, and ask the BIOS to boot from the > external usb disk, eventually nothing happens, and my machine then > defaults to booting off my internal disk. What could be causing this? > i've had other operating systems on this external USB disk in the > past, so I know it's perfectly capable of being detected correctly by > the BIOS. > > Since though I can't get at the disk in question, I am unsure what > information I can gather for you -- under Linux using "cfdisk", the > best information I can gather is the following: > > Number Flags Part Type Filesystem Label Size > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- - > Pri/Ext Free space 0.00MB > 4 Bootable Primary sun-ufs 2000396MB > > And: > > Partition info > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- - > > Possible partition device: /dev/sdb4 > Partition type: Primary > > Partition size in bytes: 2000396288512B > Partition size in sectors: 3907024001s > Portion of the hard disk: 100% > > Filesystem type: sun-ufs > System type: 0xa6 > System type name: OpenBSD > > Position: 64s-3907024064s > Start (cyl,heads,sector): 0,1,1 > End (cyl,heads,sector): 243200,254,62 > > Flags: boot > > If there's a means of providing more information to help with this, please say. > > TIA for any help. > > Kindly, > Michael > Cordialement Francois Pussault 3701 - 8 rue Marcel Pagnol 31100 ToulouseB FranceB +33 6 17 230 820 B +33 5 34 365 269 [email protected]
