From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Jan 13 3:37:39 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mailgate.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de (mailgate.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de [129.13.64.97]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A1F761517F for ; Thu, 13 Jan 2000 03:37:36 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from un1i@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de) Received: from rz114s0-priv-server (rz114s0-197.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de [129.13.197.20]) by mailgate.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de with esmtp (Exim 3.02 #2) id 128iZJ-0007hr-00; Thu, 13 Jan 2000 12:37:33 +0100 Received: from un1i by rz114s0-priv-server with local (Exim 2.12 #1) id 128iZB-00035T-00; Thu, 13 Jan 2000 12:37:25 +0100 From: Philipp Mergenthaler To: whitehat@home.com, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: floppy install X-Newsgroups: list.freebsd-questions In-Reply-To: <85jkng$1tjg$1@atlantis.rz.tu-clausthal.de> User-Agent: tin/1.4-19991113 ("No Labels") (UNIX) (HP-UX/B.11.00 (9000/829)) Message-Id: Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 12:37:25 +0100 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In article <85jkng$1tjg$1@atlantis.rz.tu-clausthal.de> you wrote:55 > Hi, I am currently trying to re-install FreeBSD 3.3 on my 486, and I am > getting an interesting error on the last two disks of my installation > floppies. The error says "Write failure on transfer! (wrote -1 bytes of > 1024 bytes)" I have tried replacing the last two disks numerous times to > no avail; so I know that the disks are not damaged. Is it that the > files themselves are corrupt? [...] It's possible, but not very probable. I don't know if this will help, but here are some ideas: - if the error occurs soon after going to one floppy, maybe it was the last file on the previous floppy that was defective. - All the files (e.g. bin.aa, bin.ab, ...) are supposed to have a size of 240640 bytes (except the last one of each distribution and the .inf files). (In case you downloaded the files with a web browser, especially check the files with the extensions .ai and .cc .) - At the beginning of the installation, you could go to the "Options" screen and enable "Debugging". Later, when the error occurs, hit ALT+F2 to see the debugging messages. (Probably this won't help much, though). - Is it possible that the disk or partition is full? You could hit ALT-F4 to go to the emergency shell and enter "/bin/df" to see if there's no space left. (df should be available by the time you reach the last few floppies.) > Also, is their any way to compress a > hard drive in DOS previous to a FreeBSD installation? [...] I'm afraid I only know that such tools exist, not how you'd do this. Bye, Philipp -- http://www.uni-karlsruhe.de/~un1i/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message