Try installing DragonFly again

Did you try to install DragonFly relatively recently and it never made it past the bootloader?  Apparently there’s a bug in some BIOS when using a smaller USB drive to install.  The loader checks multiple places for information, and if it checks somewhere that’s ‘farther’ than the end of the disk (i.e. 6G on a 4G USB key), the machine locks up.

Matthew Dillon and Kyle Davis spent a good number of hours figuring this out today, and Matt committed a fix.   So, if you were bit by this problem, try a -LATEST image about 24 hours from now and see if it works.

2 Replies to “Try installing DragonFly again”

  1. Pardon me for asking what could be a stupid question, but that commit touched a file called hammer2.c , and if hammer2 isn’t in production yet for installing as a default , why would it affect installing from a USB drive?

  2. The actual error was from when Hammer boot support was added – it looks in the various places there could be records, or duplicates of those records, which is assumed to be at 0, 2, 4, and 6G into the disk, if I am remembering correctly.

    The error comes from some BIOS not being able to handle it when you try to access a disk value that is beyond the actual value of the disk. So, it’s touching Hammer files because it’s part of checking for Hammer – and Hammer 2 boot support has already been built in.

Comments are closed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)

Mentions

  • Justin Sherrill
  • Anonymous