X-OpenMail-Hops: 1 Priority: Urgent Importance: High Date: Wed, 3 Jun 1998 08:16:24 -0500 Subject: RE: Installation bug REPLY: dan....@mail.sprint.com or con...@primenet.com TO: con...@primenet.com X-UIDL: eb29092ce742484f60f6f23e5ebfb8d7 X-Status:

---------- From: Dan Early Sent: Monday, June 01, 1998 8:19 AM To: 'free...@freebsd.org' Subject: Installation bug REPLY: dan....@mail.sprint.com or con...@primenet.com Importance: High

I sent the below a week ago. Since then gave up on the pc, put Windows on it and gave it to my wife. I tried making a small dos partition and putting BSD on the rest of the drive. All the tricks mentioned in the book. Same results as below. But I'm planning on building a new pc with an smp board, onboard scsi controller & several fancy options. I'd still like to load BSD on this machine, so if there is anything I did wrong below I'd still like to know what it was. I decided to try BSD at the recommendation of a friend here who is on your development list. At this point it's not looking very good. How 'bout a reply?

---------- From: Dan Early Sent: Thursday, May 21, 1998 12:14 PM To: 'free...@freebsd.org' Subject: Installation bug Importance: High

I recently bought a copy of "Free BSD." It is a commonly sold installation package with 4 CDs and a book. I have been unable to install it. To date, the book & CDs has cost me about $55, plus over $300 in new hardware. While I have never used BSD much, I know enough UNIX to have installed Solaris (for example) some 50 times maybe.

This system is a Pentium 166, 32 Meg RAM, BTC IDE 24X CD drive, Conner 540 (?) Meg IDE with 1048/16/1048/63 geometry. Graphics from a Trident 512K card. It uses an onboard IDE controller. The installation described below has also been tried with a second IDE drive, a Maxtor 200 Meg IDE with the same results. Both of these drives have previously had Linux loaded without any problem.

Bios is Award P&P v1.0A. It is set to autoconfigure the drive and recognized the IDE drive as a secondary master at 540 Meg, etc. on boot. This formats to 515 Meg, I understand because of having greater than 1024 cylinders. The CD drive is recognized at boot and the installation boots from the CD without any apparent problem.

Configuring the kernal, I delete SCSI drivers, ethernet drivers and other drivers I am not presently using.

At the setup screen, I note that the release name is 2.2.5, and I set it to debug, source from the CD drive.

I do a custom installation. The partions show two: the first from block 0-63, unused, the second taking the rest of the disk dedicated to BSD, and set bootable. The numbers for this show as 63 1056321 1056381 wd2s1 Ptype=3 freebsd 165. The drive geometry does show as 1048/16/63. I accept the default newfs options.

For boot managers, I have tried setting it to install both a FBSD boot manager and not install any.

Label:

I accept defaults for size. This produces the following:

wds1a / 32 M UFS Y wd2s1f swap 73 M wd2s1e /var 30 M UFS Y wd2s1f /usr 379M UFS Y

I install the kernal-developer version. I install no other packages. On accepting this, the installation begins and I do an Alt-F4 to go to a shell, and Alt F2 to watch the installation process. I do a df when it completes. This produces:

root_dev 2495 96% / /dev/wd2a 46% /mnt /dev/wd2s1f 19% /mnt/usr /dev/wd2s1e 0% /mnt/var wdc0c 100% /dist

I can see /kernal is copied to /

On rebooting the machine, it does a probe to assorted devices, sends a "panic, can't mount /" message and goes into a reboot cycle. If I try giving it a specific boot command, such as "boot: 1:wd(2,a)?" or many variations of that, it either says it can't find it or it returns an "error [memory address]" in an infinite loop.

I have tried variations on this installation numerous times from the CD and also from a diskette boot image. It always fails the same way. I gave the CD to a friend here at work, who put it on a partition on his PC. It installed normally for him.

Any suggestions appreciated. Please reply e-mail to either: con...@primenet.com or Dan....@mail.sprint.com.