From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jul 7 18:44:24 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from yoss.nonline.net (yoss.nonline.net [207.139.235.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D629614D5E for ; Wed, 7 Jul 1999 18:44:16 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from yossman@nonline.net) Received: from localhost (yossman@localhost) by yoss.nonline.net (8.9.3/8.8.5) with ESMTP id UAA15062; Wed, 7 Jul 1999 20:28:55 -0500 (EST) Date: Wed, 7 Jul 1999 21:28:55 -0400 (EDT) From: yossman To: mike@hyperreal.org Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD 3.2.0-RELEASE -- HDD code weirdness? Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG just wanted to let you know i recently went through hell trying to get the boot process to go right on a FreeBSD3.2.0R install i was doing on a pretty standard minimal pentium 166MHz. two IDE drives in the system, they both had a bootable copy of FreeBSD on them (from two different versions). the FreeBSD booteasy manager would (seemingly) randomly pick which drive to boot from, which would cause all sorts of interesting hangs and 'i'm stuck, help!' prompts. both drives were IDE, BIOS MODE 1, full FreeBSD partitions, in compatibility mode (165). i finally managed to get around my problem of non-bootness by arranging the drives physically as master and slave in the order i wanted them to boot from on the primary chain, then booting the install floppy, going into the partition editor, editing wd0, doing nothing, hitting 'Q', selecting 'standard boot record', then going BACK into the partition editor under wd0, and 'W'riting out the changes. the system didn't seem to have a choice but boot from wd0 after that and now things are cool. ;) however, now i have a new problem with another machine, pentiumII-233MHz, ASUS P5A-B r1.04 motherboard, single IDE drive on primary chain, 64M RAM (DIMM). it refuses to boot from wd0 once i've finished installing FreeBSD3.2.0-R from the Net. everything goes fine in the installation process, floppies boot fine, no mention of anything bad that i can see. i finish adding some packages, set the root password, exit the install, system reboots, i get 'F1 FreeBSD' (my only choice of course), then as soon as the little spinning character comes up the system stops. i can still get a response from the keyboard LEDs (numlock, etc), but the rest of the system is just gone. i have to reset, only to have the same thing happen again. i even tried changing every single piece of hardware in the box, making a brand new config, with a random celeron i had, ASUS P2B r1.10, some standard PCI S3 card.. exact same problem. tried pulling cards, replacing this and that, etc. i'm going to try installing FreeBSD3.2.0-R on it AGAIN i think, if it fails again on first bootup from harddrive i think i'm going to go back to 2.2.8-R or even 2.2.6-R, both of which have worked flawlessly on any system i installed them on.. ;( is there some sort of new drive probe at bootup? i noticed another person on here was having no luck booting his -current system after 02may1999, with a problem that sounds similar to mine. there is the remote chance that the harddrive is screwed in some way, but i have this funny feeling if i installed w95 on it things would work fine. yossman ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Yossarian Holmberg (yossman) yossman@nonline.net Senior Systems Administrator http://www.nonline.net/ National Online Inc. National Computers and Supplies To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message