Date: Tue, 3 Jan 1995 19:33:20 (CST) From: lets@risc.austin.ibm.com (Richard Letsinger) To: questions@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD Org) Cc: lets@lets.austin.ibm.com Subject: FreeBSD Installation Difficulties Message-ID: <9501040133.AA42263@risc.austin.ibm.com>
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Hello, I just got FreeBSD 2.0 on CDROM from Walnut Creek and spent most of New Year's Day trying to install it. I ran into some problems and have a couple of questions. My machine is a 486DX2/66 with 16MB, a 1.44MB diskette drive, and 2 hard disks, a WD 2340 and a WD 2540. It is a clone that IBM manufactures for resale by another company. It has an AT bus, an SVGA display (CTX), and a CD drive that appears to me to be generic (if there is such a thing). The CD drive has its own card, that is it's not SCSI and it's not plugged into my Sound Blaster 16 card. Hard disk 0 (325MB) has 2 partitions, a DOS primary of 200MB with IBM DOS 6.1 and a DOS extended partition of 124MB with OS/2 WARP. DOS is on drive C: and OS/2 is on drive D:. There's also a 1MB thing (partition?) that has the OS/2 boot manager that allows me to select DOS or OS/2. Hard disk 1 (516MB) also has 2 partitions, the first of which is a DOS extended partition of 153MB which is drive letter E:. The 2 partitions on disk 0 and this first one on disk 1 were made with the DOS FDISK. The second partition on disk 1 is a FreeBSD slice made with the FreeBSD Fdisk. The FreeBSD slice has 350MB which brings it up to the 1024 (sector/cylinder?) limit. The remaining 12MB are unused as I believe they must be. My first concern after reading the installation guide, release note, etc. was that I was not going to be able to install FreeBSD from the Walnut Creek CD because my CD drive is probably not supported by FreeBSD. Obviously I could get started, because the top level of the CD is DOS format, but it looked to me like once the DOS portion of the installation was done and I booted from FreeBSD to do the rest of the installation, I would run into this CD drive support problem. However, I didn't get far enough to find out so let me ask. - Assuming that my CD drive is not Mitsumi (and not SCSI), is it hopeless to try to install FreeBSD from the Walnut Creek CD? If so, can the files on the CD be copied to my empty DOS E: drive and install from E:? Other alternatives? As I say, I didn't get that far. I did successfully make the boot and cpio diskettes and boot from the boot floppy. In FreeBSD Disklabel, I Edited a 20MB root (partition a), a 40MB swap (b), a 200MB /usr (f), and a 90MB /usr/users (g). Partition c was the expected 350MB FreeBSD and d was the expected 516MB full disk (or vice versa). However the 153MB DOS slice was not at h, but rather at e. And, it didn't have a type of "MSDOS", but had "unused". - Why didn't my disk 1 153MB DOS slice show up at h with "MSDOS"? My guess on this is that only a primary DOS partition would come up at h with "MSDOS". Taking off on this notion, while I would like to be able to mount my DOS slice under FreeBSD, I don't want a second primary DOS partition at this stage. Making a a second primary DOS partition would move DOS drive letter D: from my OS/2 partition on disk 0 to the DOS partition on disk 1 and would change the OS/2 partition drive letter to E:. My drive letters are already hard-coded in many files and would be a pain to try to change. With regard to mounting DOS drives/partitions/slices: - If I keep my DOS partition on disk 1 as an extended DOS partition, will I be able to mount it under FreeBSD? If so, how? - What ever I do on disk 1, will I be able to mount either of the DOS partitions on disk 0 under FreeBSD? If so, how? So, I defined my FreeBSD partitions with Disklabel Edit and executed Write. Then I Assigned a to /, b to swap, f to /usr, and g to /usr/users. Assign would not allow me to Assign e to /dos. Then I Quit, Proceeded, and said yes to the install. A bunch of files were copied from the diskette to disk 1 and I was told to reboot from the hard disk. By the way, back in FreeBSD Fdisk, I did a Write MBR. Actually I did 2 of them, once, accidently, while looking at disk 0, and once, on purpose, while looking at disk 1. The hard disk reboot went well at first. My first prompt, from the boot manager was: F2 ... dos F3 ... OS2 F5 ... disk 2 Default: F? - Why does the boot manager call it disk 2 when unix calls it disk 1 (wd1)? It took a while to puzzle this out, but eventually I pushed F5 and got: F2 ... FreeBSD F5 ... disk 1 Default: F? I pushed F2. Here there was another stumbling block for me and it took some iterations with the documentation to realize that I needed to enter something because I was not booting from disk 0. When I typed the following (with little delay), things proceeded. hd(1,a)/kernel FreeBSD began to come up. It checked a slew of devices. I recognized my parallel port and my 2 hard disks and the data displayed for them seemed correct to me. Then the boot stopped with: panic: cannot mount root I've spent a good deal of today going through comp.os.386BSD.questions to see if anyone else has had this problem (or any of the others mentioned). The only thing I came across was someone who was booting from his second disk said he used: wd(1,a)/kernel - I got "hd" from the CD documentation, I think in the Trouble Shooting guide. Should I be using "wd" or was the appender to questions in error? - If "wd" isn't the answer, do you have any help for me on this problem? I'd also like to ask a few things about the boot manager. - Did I do any damage when I accidently did a Write MBR in FreeBSD Fdisk on disk 0? Was anything written anywhere by this? Maybe I was supposed to do a Write MBR on disk 0? The FreeBSD boot manager didn't go in the same place as the OS/2 boot manager I already had installed. I say this because if I press F3 (the OS/2 option) in FreeBSD boot manager, I get my familiar OS/2 boot manager screen and can boot either DOS or OS/2 just as I always did. - So, where was the FreeBSD boot manager put? On disk 0? On disk 1? Both? Not on the OS/2 boot manager (because it still runs). My guess on this is that there is a boot record (my term) at the beginning of (one or each) disk that sends the boot to code in a disk partition and that the FreeBSD boot manager is in the FreeBSD slice. Then the FreeBSD boot manager is able to branch to any other partition on any disk and it happens that the OS/2 boot manager is in it's own partition on disk 0. - Last, I saw in questions that someone said the FreeBSD boot manager can be manipulated with DOS FDISK using the /MBR option, but it wasn't clear to me what FDISK /MBR did. I'll read the DOS manual when I get home tonight, but can you tell me in case the manual is not clear with regard to non-DOS setups like mine? Thank you very much for taking the time to read (and answer?) these questions. I'd really like to get unix up on my system at home and, based on colleague recommendations, FreeBSD seemed to be the best way to go. Your help is very much appreciated. Richard Letsinger ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Richard Letsinger | Austin, TX 78758 | e-mail: lets@risc.austin.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Required disclaimer: This note is from me and is independent of IBM. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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