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Date:      Thu, 24 Dec 1998 17:16:10 -0800 (PST)
From:      Bryce Newall <data@dreamhaven.net>
To:        FreeBSD Questions List <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   More problems
Message-ID:  <Pine.NEB.3.96.981224165111.516B-100000@dreamhaven.net>

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Hello all, and Merry Christmas Eve!

It seems I only write when I'm having trouble... well, I've got a couple
of real doosies this time.  These both came about from trying to swap out
a couple of hard drives between two machines (which didn't work, but more
on that later), and trying to upgrade one machine from 2.2.5-STABLE to
2.2.8-STABLE.

The problem I ran into in the upgrade process was that my machine no
longer recognizes its 3Com 3C905 ethernet card (not the B version).  Under
the 2.2.5-STABLE kernel, it would recognize it as follows:

Dec 24 13:12:01 voyager /kernel: vx0 <3COM 3C905 Fast Etherlink XL PCI>
rev 0 in t a irq 9 on pci0:13

Under the 2.2.8-STABLE kernel, though, it does this:

Dec 24 16:14:09 voyager /kernel: pci0:13:    vendor=0x10b7, device=0x9050,
class=network (ethernet) int a irq 9 [no driver assigned]

I know one of the things 2.2.8 was supposed to include support for was the
new 3C905B card, but I would assume that doesn't mean support for the
plain '905 was dropped ?!

Ok, onto the next problem... it seems that both my old 2.2.7 boot disk and
my 2.2.8 boot disk will no longer boot on either of two systems.  It gets
through the visual configuration section, and then when I quit and save, I
get an immediate "Fatal trap 12" error, and the system reboots.  This came
about because of the 3rd problem I'm about to describe...

I was trying to swap hard drives between 2 machines.  Normally not a big
deal, except that both drives happened to be the root partition on each
drive (d'oh!).  The machine called ds9 had an 850 MB SCSI drive as /, and
the machine called voyager had a 540 MB SCSI drive as /.  The object was
to swap the two and end up with a bigger drive for voyager.  Here's the
procedure I followed:

1) Installed ds9's 850 into Voyager as a high SCSI ID.
2) Booted voyager into single-user off it's 540.
3) Copied contents of 850 into a temp dir on the 540 (it all fit).
4) Zapped and repartitioned the 850 so that it could be swap, /, and /var
(thus enabling me to rid my system of an IDE swap drive).
5) Copied everything from the 540 to the correct dirs on the 850 (except
the temp dir).
6) Shut down voyager, removed the 540, put the 850 in its place as SCSI ID
0.
7) Powered back on, got boot loader, but it couldn't find the kernel on
sd(0,a).  Figured that was because I made swap first, so I told it to look
at sd(0,b), and it found a kernel.  However, despite copying the kernel
file from voyager's 540, the kernel still showed that it was ds9's kernel.
It also went into sysinstall on bootup, and wouldn't let me out without
rebooting.

I suspect that, from #7, somehow there's something similar to Linux that
tells the machine specifically on what sector to look for the kernel.
That may be what's happening, since fdisk only mucks with the partition
table, and not with the actual data that was on the drive.  So I'm
suspicious that it's booting from the wrong kernel and going into stupid
mode.  When I put the 540 back in as ID 0 and leave the 850 out, all is
fine.  What I'm wondering is, is there a way I can copy the contents of 
the 540 to the 850 and tell the 850's boot loader where its kernel is?

I thought I could just reinstall FreeBSD on the 850, but that's when I ran
into trouble with the boot disk.... (bleah).  Fortunately, the 540 still
has the contents of itself plus the 850, so I haven't lost any data.. yet.

Thanks in advance for any help!

**********************************************************************
*       Bryce Newall       *       Email: data@dreamhaven.net        *
*               WWW: http://home.dreamhaven.net/~data                *
*       "Insanity takes its toll.  Please have exact change."        *
**********************************************************************


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