Re: 7.5 NO hard drive?

On 4/7/24 03:03, latinfo@vcn.bc.ca wrote:
>> Hello
>>
>> i have 1 DELL Latitude E4300 that had OBSD 7.3 working correctly, but i
>> decided to do a clean installation of 7.5 deleting everything on it with a
>> live cd linux; then tested 7.5 and it says NO disk.
>>
>> After that i tested Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD all them where installed
>> without a problem; But, OBSD 7.3 7.4 7.5 said NO disk!
>>
>> It is something related to OBSD?
>> What could happened?
>> How to install OBSD 7.5
>>
>> PS:
>> Thanks for the new version 7.5 i run 2 laptops and 1 server with it!
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>
> So OpenBSD has been correctly installed, thanks so much to maintain it nice!
>
> The problem was with the BIOS, it needs IHCH or something like that to be
> recognized!
> But it is working now as a xfce Desktop!
>
>

probably AHCI and not the so-called RAID mode that many Dells default to, but
definitely not Dell only "feature".

This is our 25+ year "friend", BIOS assisted software RAID. The idea is the
BIOS will handle initial tagging and replication of the drive until the OS is
booted, then the OS takes over as it takes over the low-level disk support.
This handles the "boot off any surviving disk" issue, but it creates a huge
potential issue where a drive might end up being duplicated by the BIOS to a
second disk...unintended! This would be bad. Not only could you clobber
data on a second drive, but in the modern world of UUIDs for disks, you just
put two disks on the same system with the same "uniq" identifiers, and one
of those disks is very incomplete. This is also bad.

OpenBSD disabled this "RAID" mode support over ten years ago (from memory),
FreeBSD did around the same time, and a number of Linux distros took their
time, but eventually did the same thing.

Now...this was true on OpenBSD 7.3 as well, so something changed on your
computer, I'm suspicious your CMOS battery has died, and the system came back
up in the defaults, which include this RAID "feature".

Nick.