Sunday, October 13, 2024

Re: Temporary Windows10 install to update firmware causes later OpenBSD installer 'failed to install bootblocks'

On Monday, October 14th, 2024 at 05:32, Chris Billington <cbillington@emulti.net> wrote:

> (Panasonic CF-SZ6 Let's Note laptop, AMD64, UEFI)
>
> In an effort to isolate the cause of Touchpad detection failure on
> 7.5/7.6, I temporarily installed Windows 10 on the disk to update the
> UEFI and EC firmwares, as the existing versions were very old and I
> couldn't find another way to update them.
>
> On reinstall, a 'standard' install with 'Auto' partition layout and
> 'GPT whole disk' using install75.img or install76.img both failed with:
>
> installboot: mkdir('/tmp/installboot.<random string>/efi/BOOT')
>
> failed: Not a directory
>
> Failed to install bootblocks
> You will not be able to boot OpenBSD rom sd0
>
> I was able to recover with 'fdisk -e' and 'reinit'. This allowed the
> installer to complete, but the machine still did not boot, as it
> appears all the UEFI boot records in the firmware were wiped.
>
> Recovery was by booting a Linux install USB and using efibootmgr to
> manually create a boot record pointing to the OpenBSD BOOTX64.EFI.
>
> It seems installing Windows 10 did 'something' to the first sectors of
> the disk that causes the OpenBSD installboot to fail. Maybe the MBR.
>
> Does anyone know what Windows did to cause this? What is
> the best way to recover from it, given that my version above was
> mostly guesswork? Maybe a note could be added to install.amd64 with
> details of workarounds, as many machines will previously have had
> Windows installed.

Hi,

Just my 2 cents as this has happened to me before when installing
OpenBSD on a laptop that had linux on it before. It happened a few
times and what I've had to do to avoid it is just blank the initial
blocks of the drive by overwriting with zeroes. That has fixed it
every time.

It's probably enough with a few MB, but last time I had this problem,
just last week I just run:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/$disk bs=1M

and let it run for a while, then reboot and try installing again.
That worked OK.

Roberto Mallo

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