atom feed14 messages in org.freebsd.freebsd-questionsFailed installation of FreeBSD 5.4
FromSent OnAttachments
MilscvaerAug 12, 2005 3:16 pm 
Greg BarniskisAug 12, 2005 4:04 pm 
dpkAug 12, 2005 5:07 pm 
MilscvaerAug 12, 2005 8:22 pm 
al...@scii.nlAug 12, 2005 8:35 pm 
MilscvaerAug 12, 2005 8:55 pm 
MilscvaerAug 12, 2005 10:13 pm 
MilscvaerAug 14, 2005 2:37 pm 
Gary W. SwearingenAug 14, 2005 3:50 pm 
MilscvaerAug 14, 2005 6:19 pm 
MilscvaerAug 14, 2005 6:21 pm 
MilscvaerAug 15, 2005 2:22 am 
MilscvaerAug 15, 2005 3:30 am 
Gary W. SwearingenAug 15, 2005 3:34 pm 
Subject:Failed installation of FreeBSD 5.4
From:Milscvaer (mill@yahoo.com)
Date:Aug 15, 2005 3:30:05 am
List:org.freebsd.freebsd-questions

--- "Gary W. Swearingen" <gar@opusnet.com> wrote:

Milscvaer <mill@yahoo.com> writes:

I am sorry, I should explain the situation a more clearly.

And I'm sorry that I don't have much more to say.

First, I apologise for being so upset. I was rather frustrated by this.

I think that BTX stuff is part of "boot2". I know this is a fairly common problem (which I've had too), but I don't know what to do about it beyond "doing something different". :(

Normally you would want to use at the boot: prompt: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/loader instead of 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel

This is the critical information I needed to know! I tried /boot/loader and I am now able to boot into FreeBSD 5.4 off the floppy! After booting, Everything seems to be fine and as it should be. This is great, I can just leave the floppy in the drive, and boot from that. There must be something wrong with the boot records that fdisk is not correcting.

I know friends who have had unuseable boot records as well and have to boot from floppies, Its not really a big inconvenience.

To be honest, FreeBSD is the only OS that seems to run on this system, I tried OpenBSD and NetBSD and both cannot even boot into the installer.

FreeBSD is still a good OS.

Thank you for all of your help, I really appreciate it.

I'd normally guess that the disk geometry has gotten confused somehow, but if you're able to see the 5.4 files with the fixit disk, geometry is probably OK.

The fixit floppy usually doesn't have the command one needs to do what one wants to do, but I should support replacing the HDD MBR with fdisk, using a DOS-style MBR that you have to set the active partition. Then that should boot to 5.4's boot1 sector which should start boot2, which should start /boot/loader or give a prompt. If the fixit floppy has bsdlabel (and has a /boot/boot1, etc), you could try replacing the boot1 & boot2 records, but don't wipe out the disk's bsdlabel.

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