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Date:      Mon, 17 Jul 1995 23:49:30 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Chuck Robey <chuckr@Glue.umd.edu>
To:        Tony Harverson <harverso@beastie.cs.und.ac.za>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: S0S !
Message-ID:  <Pine.SUN.3.91.950717234136.18612C-100000@latte.eng.umd.edu>
In-Reply-To: <199507170818.KAA00561@beastie.cs.und.ac.za>

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On Mon, 17 Jul 1995, Tony Harverson wrote:

> Morning all,
> 
> 
> This is now an official S0S - I am at my wits end with 2.0.5's install. 
> When I installed 2.0 on the machine in question,  it detected the geometry
> of the 640mb scsi perfect (well, I dunno if it was perfect, but it worked -
> boot blocks in the right place and all)  Anyway, a 2.0 kernel detects the
> drive to have geometry 1632/15/53 but the 2.0 install detects 1650/15/53
> (which worked last time)  putting these geometries into the install of 2.0.5
> has been no help (it also uses 1650 in the install, but putting 1632 has
> been tried with no effect).  I've tried everything from 2 paritions ( both
> freebsd ( 25mb active one with the / filesystem on) to a full disk as
> freebsd with a 25mb / filesystem ( this was the old system) all with
> absolutely NO luck.  If booted off a floppy and pointed to sd0, then the
> system works (telneting from there to my current machine at the moment) but
> the boot blocks seem determined not to write to the proper place - all I'm
> getting is that wonderful 'Missing Operating System' Message.
> 
> Below is an edited version of the systems dmesg (took out everything that is
> not related to the disk..

Unfortunately, that was a wrong thing to do.  FreeBSD is incredibly good 
at finding problems with your hardware, but not so hot at telling you 
exactly where your problem lies.  Your assumption that it's your disk is, 
believe me, not a sure thing at all, and is quite possibly leading you 
astray.  This same kinda thing happened to me, when I first tried 
bringing up FreeBSD (back at version 1.0).  Look at all the other 
components of your system.  What I did, which worked to find three 
separate hardware problems hitting me at one time, was to pull every 
board inthe computer except the very barest minimum, then get it working 
at that point.

Once you have that right, you can add in the other boards one by one, and 
probably find your headache, or at minimum, give enough info to the guys 
listening here.  They really want to help you, but what you've offered in 
the way of info isn't enough to figure out your problem.  Have you a 
sound card, or a CDROM, network card, etc?  Think about it.

----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------
Chuck Robey                 | Interests include any kind of voice or data 
chuckr@eng.umd.edu          | communications topic, C programming, and Unix.
9120 Edmonston Ct #302      |
Greenbelt, MD 20770         | I run Journey2 (Freebsd 2.0) and n3lxx
(301) 220-2114              | (FreeBSD 1.1.5.1) and am I happy!
----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------




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