Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 02:26:15 +0200 From: Sebastian Reichelt <SebastianR@gmx.de> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD Installation Horror Message-ID: <20050505022615.2abcf4c6.SebastianR@gmx.de>
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Hello! As a programmer and computer science student, I wanted to try out FreeBSD on my old computer (Pentium 166). Mainly I just want to get to know the differences between FreeBSD and Linux, and see whether it really has a better design (which many people I know claim). However, so far I have not been able to install it on my hard drive. I have already spent several days on this. Please help me, this is becoming really frustrating. I downloaded the three floppy images for 5.3-RELEASE and dd'ed them on the disks. Then I booted the installation and tried to partition my hard drive. To my surprise, the partition table shown by the installation was complete nonsense. I figured it probably had something to do with the fact that my BIOS doesn't support the disk size. I'm using the OnTrack disk manager to fix the problem for Windows. So I booted from the disk, and used the OnTrack feature to boot from a floppy after OnTrack has been loaded. The partition table was exactly the same junk, though. I also tried different geometries (reported by LILO, BIOS, FreeBSD installation, etc.), but this didn't change the view of the partition table either. OK, so I emptied another (smaller) disk and tried to install FreeBSD on it. I have a PPP connection to another PC over a serial cable on COM1, which works fine from Windows. (The other PC is running Linux with a script to emulate a modem.) So I thought I would use the same link for the FreeBSD installation. I selected PPP on COM1, then it ran the PPP program, but this program always crashes the entire computer after a few seconds, even if I don't type anything. Of course, then I got someone to burn me a CD. I booted from the CD, but then the kernel said it couldn't figure out which drive it was booting from. Apparently it had not detected the CDROM at all for some reason. So I had to boot from floppy over and over again. (It would be nice to be able to put the installation program on a small hard disk partition.) Then I selected CD as the installation medium. Somehow the CDROM has some problems reading the CD; this is not FreeBSD's fault, of course. However, when it gets to the bad locations, usually it reports a page fault and reboots! Now this is getting really annoying... By now, I have tried to get the CD burnt three times, but every single one of them seems to be broken at some place. With the latest one, at least the installation doesn't page fault any more. But it still aborts if it can't read some file. If it didn't do that, I would probably be finished by now. As a last resort, I tried to copy the installation files from the CD to a disk. I can't use the OnTrack-formatted disk because FreeBSD can't read it. So I have to use the disk I want to install to. After all, it could read the files, and the installation went fine. When I rebooted, the boot manager showed up, and asked me to press F1 for DOS (the source partition), F2 for FreeBSD, and F5 for the other disk. When I pressed F2, it just beeped, but didn't do anything. I thought that maybe I could only install FreeBSD on the first partition, then. (Although that really surprises me.) So I created an extended partition, copied the installation files there, and deleted the primary partition. Oh no, FreeBSD can't read extended partitions! How nice: It expects the installation files to be on a primary partition, but you can only install it on the first partition? I think that in the Linux fdisk, I can create up to 4 primary partitions, but the Windows version only supports one. This is the story so far. Please help me find a happy end. Thank you very much. -- Sebastian Reichelt
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