Unable to Boot DBAN Disk

  • Thread starter Thread starter Anonymous
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Anonymous

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When I try to boot from the DBAN disk I get the following error:
SYSLINUX 2.08 2003-12-12 Boot Failed

I'm using DBAN 1.0.3, and my system is a Gateway P5-200, with an Adaptec 2940 Ultra/Ultra W SCSI controller. The disks (3x) are Seagate ST32155W.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
John Paradise
 
You probably have a bad floppy disk. Try another and report back.

If your computer is actually incompatible with SysLinux, then I'll walk you through the way to install a more conservative boot loader.
 
Thanks. Apparently the floppy was bad. I tried another one, and it seems to boot up OK. I'm now having a different problem. At the boot prompt, I press Enter to start interactive mode. I see the msgs:
Loading kernel.bzi.....
Loading initrd.gz....
Ready.
Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernal. Please wait...

After about a minute or so, the screen clears and several new messages appear, including one (I think) that says "Starting dwipe". However, after just a few seconds the screeen is cleared again, and the following is displayed:
DBAN finished with non-fatal errors. Check the log for more information.
Hardware clock operation start date: Thu Apr 29 20:48:36 2004
etc.
DBAN finished. Press Enter to save the log file again.

When I remove the floppy and reboot, the system comes up just as before. I don't think DBAN wrote to the hard disks at all.
 
Unpack the log file with WinZip (or any other utility) and read the dban.txt and dwipe.txt files with WordPad.

If you can't figure the problem with the log information, then post the entire tarball here or mail it to me.
 
The last line in dwipe.txt says "Storage devices not found."

I'm assuming the hardware is OK, since the system can boot from the hard disk. Also, the hard disks are present and accessible when I boot from a Win98 startup disk.

I'm wondering if the SCSI Adapter BIOS is configured in a way that is not compatible with the driver on the DBAN floppy.

Althought I'd like to write random data to the disk, it's probably not worth spending too much more time on this as I've found another utility that will write zeroes to the disks. This is probably sufficient for what I need to do.

Many thanks for your help. I have some systems with IDE disks that I will be retiring in the future, so I'll probably give DBAN another try then.
 
If you're running a hard RAID array with an Adaptec controller, then DBAN will find the disks if you disable "Hostraid" mode in the controller setup. (ie: "Push <F2> to enter setup" when the computer starts.)
 
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