Heylas again,
On Thu, 29 Oct 2020 21:40:05 -0700, Greg Thomas wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 8:42 PM Amelia A Lewis <[email protected]> wrote:
[snip]
>
> If you were just running syspatch I'd be worried that a hardware failure
> showed up on reboot. I'm way out of practice for troubleshooting OpenBSD
> but booting the installer from a USB drive or CD, dropping to a shell and
> checking your disk info will answer the hardware question for you.
On Fri, 30 Oct 2020 09:21:23 -0000 (UTC), Stuart Henderson wrote:
> "No active partition" sounds like no MBR partition is marked as active.
>
> I would boot the installer, shell, "fdisk sd0" and see how it looks, or
> possonly the MBR partition table is not written correctly or has been
> somehow overwritten.
>
Thanks to both of you; I followed up by cracking the case (partly
because the only drive the BIOS had in its boot order was the Toshiba,
and I was pretty sure the boot volume was on an Crucial SSD). With a
little fiddling (changing boot order (when it let me), switching
uefi+legacy to legacy only (and even uefi only, but the only drive that
has gpt is the big data drive (the Toshiba), which doesn't have
anything bootable).
What seems to have happened, weirdly enough, is that my SSDs have gone
from sd in 6.7 and before (at least 6.6) to wd in 6.8. I've got my
daily output from 29 Oct (I keep most recent daily output emails, in
case i need them), which lists everything as sd (sd0 [ssd, boot volume]
and sd2 [toshiba data drive]). Now everything but the boot volume is
disconnected, and it's not sd0, it's wd0. Which might explain its
disappearance ... no, wrong level.
I just brought it up using 'boot /bsd.sp', which bypasses the kernel
crash (which I didn't mention before because I hadn't seen it before):
apparently, when bsd.mp crashes, it drops into ddb, and something
happens that registers in bios: the disk stops being available to the
bios. Variations on unplugging and replugging it, and fiddling with
boot order and 'csm' options will make it find the bootloader again.
Since the behavior is rather strikingly weird (though prolly
irreproducible by sane mortals), I'm gonna open a bug report, on the
chance that I've triggered something that folks there might recognize.
Amy!
--
Amelia A. Lewis amyzing {at} talsever.org
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that
have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are
mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
-- Edsger Dijkstra
