Date: Sun, 19 Apr 1998 17:16:53 -0400 (EDT) From: Charlie Sorsby <crs@hgo.net> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: 2.2.5 Installation Problems Message-ID: <199804192116.RAA00317@quail.hgo.net>
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A quick question to see if there's something obvious that I'm doing wrong. I took notes this time around but haven't had time to type them in yet. Yesterday or day before, I installed 2.2.5 from the Walnut Creek CDROM on my system, having finally bought a second hard drive. My objective was to install 2.2.5 on the second hard drive, leaving (for the time being) W95 and FreeBSD 2.1.5 on the first. My thinking was that I would have a working FreeBSD (2.1.5) actually to use and then I could get 2.2.5 set up the way I want it at my leisure, eventually, giving its disk space to 2.2.5. Well, as the feller said, "The best laid plans of mice and men ..." Smart feller, that. Robbie Burns, wasn't it? Here's a quick summary (I'll include the part about X configuration for completeness but my real question will be about the boot manager. During installation, at the X configuration part of the process, I was asked it I wanted the XF86Setup approach and tried it. Well, when it said "... This may take a while." it did--and then instead of putting me into XF86Setup or giving me a second chance at selecting XF86config, it jumped to the screen that asks if I want to browse the package collection! Anyway, I decided not to fool with configuring X at that time and proceeded. After the point where the popup warns about rebooting the system, things appeared to be normal as far a I could guess what normal might be. When it got to the point where the boot manager gives a choice, I was given three choices--alright so far, I thought. The choices were F1 for W95, F2 for BSD (2.1.5), and F5 for BSD (2.2.5). I pressed F5 and it actually booted to 2.2.5. Well, I fiddled with it for a while and then decided to boot back to 2.1.5 for a while (where X is running). When, later, I tried to boot back to 2.2.5 the boot manager went into some kind of infinite loop as soon as I pressed F5, ignoring my F5 presses--well, not exactly, it kept switching between the two boot managers (that on the second disk seems only to have two choices (F2 & F5, as I recall). As long as I pressed F5 or allowed the default to kick in, it kept switching back and forth. I had, of course, removed the installation CDROM from the drive during the initial post-installation boot process (although the popup only warns about floppies). Eventually, I pressed F2 and got back to 2.1.5 which booted *almost* normally. The departure from normalcy that I noticed was that right after selecting F2, it produced the following complaints: Can't find file, boot.conf. Can't find file, boot.help. Then it proceeded to boot (normally as far as I could tell). Well, right after I had switched back to 2.1.5 the first time, I had put the live-file-system CDROM into the drive to look at it. Never thinking for a moment that any but the installation CDROM would be bootable, it never occurred to me to remove that CDROM from the drive when I decided to boot back to 2.2.5 and--guess what!?!--it's bootable. So there I was, back in the installation process. As soon as possible, I exited that and removed the CDROM and rebooted. It was right after that, that I first experienced the boot-manager infinite loop. Well, thinking that, somehow, I'd managed to screw something up when I'd inadvertently (who'd have expected the live-file-system CDROM also to be bootable) booted to the installation software, I decided to reinstall. I first had time to do that this afternoon and did so. No help! The boot manager behaves precisely as it had done. Since it may be relevant, here's what I did during disk configuration. Having read somewhere that it was necessary to select both disks to get the boot manager, etc. on both, I selected each disk in turn in the fdisk part of the process but quit out of it immediately for the first disk (sd0). I selected "all" for the FBSD slice of the second disk. Accepted installation of the boot manager for both disks. I then selected s1 as the disk to which to install FBSD. In the next screen (partitioning the disk) I did mount-points-only for sd0, giving dummy mount points (mnt0 through mnt3) so that I could mount these partitions on 2.2.5 to facilitate using stuff in those partitions in 2.2.5. I then partitioned the new disk, s1. When I returned to 2.1.5, I created mount point and edited /etc/fstab and added mount instructions for the s1 partitions for the same reason. Here's "df -k" output as produced in 2.1.5: Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/sd0a 31775 15495 13738 53% / /dev/sd0s1 208592 149500 59092 72% /dos /dev/sd0s2g 653279 433520 167497 72% /home /dev/sd0s2f 1017327 799841 136100 85% /usr /dev/sd0s2e 63567 9686 48796 17% /var procfs 4 4 0 100% /proc /dev/sd1s1a 31775 13650 15583 47% /root.225 /dev/sd1s1d 915636 1 842385 0% /usr.news.225 /dev/sd1s1e 992751 576549 336782 63% /usr.225 /dev/sd1s1f 127151 5864 111115 5% /var.225 /dev/sd1s1g 992751 302 913029 0% /home.225 /dev/sd1s1h 992751 492869 420462 54% /usr.local.225 The sd1 names reflect their mount points in 2.2.5 and the sd0 FBSD partitions are, as I recall, mnt0, mnt1, mnt2, and mnt3 in the order shown above in 2.2.5. (I guess I could simply have provide the contents of /etc/fstab from the 2.2.5 disk for you.) Well, I hope that someone who reads this will have some suggestion as to what I've done wrong. Naturally, if you would like more information, I'll be happy to supply anything that I can. Does FreeBSD make an installation log like SunOS 4.x used to do? I can't recall ever having seen anything to suggest that it does or, if it does, where I might find it. As you may be able to tell, I pretty much had to guess what to try to do to install a second FreeBSD on a separate disk. I posted a query to the comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc news group but never say any response. Thanks for any help you can provide and please let me know if I can provide any further information. I'll type my notes in as soon as time permits and then they'll be available. Jordan once posted an invitation to comment upon the installation software--i.e. where one had trouble, etc. Maybe I'll eventually send a copy of my notes to him. There are a few areas that I found anything but intuitive and some where I got to a point that, as far as I could tell, the only way to recover from a typing error was to abort the installation and start over. Charlie Sorsby crs@hgo.net To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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