Date: Sat, 28 Feb 1998 16:24:46 -0600 From: Christopher W Ramsay <cramsay@top.net> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: FreeBSD, boot-up and SCSI. Message-ID: <1.5.4.16.19980228162818.1c3f55b4@top.net>
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First I would like to thank Doug White (dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu)
and Greg Lehey (grog@lemis.com) for the problem I was having with my mail
reader. I've set up and configured a new mail program, let's hope this
clears up the matter. Further, thanks goes out once again to Doug White for
his suggestion on installing the CD ROM as a slave to the primary EIDE
control port. His suggestion cleared up the problem I was having with
FreeBSD not being able to read my Sony CD ROM. I now have further set-up
problems and actually may not be related to FreeBSD, but it might be worth
the e-mail for advice.
My main board has SCSI built in. I had an old 411 MB SCSI hard
drive that I could devote entirely to the installation of FreeBSD. The main
board and DOS were able to read the SCSI drive and assign a drive letter w/o
having to install any of the driver software. This was due I believe to the
fact that the SCSI hard drive had already been formatted in DOS. I install
FreeBSD with the boot manager option on the SCSI drive then reboot. The C
drive has remnants of boot manager from previous attempts of FreeBSD
installations on the C drive. The machine reboots, shows the boot manager
menu: F1 DOS, F2 FreeBSD. F5 brings up my original system set-up which
includes E-Z drive. My D and E drives are actually two logical drives on one
3.1 gig Western Digital. If I press F1, the boot-up bypasses the EZ-bios
boot sector and loads everything in autoexec.bat and config.sys reading only
A, B, C and F (my CD ROM).
Ultimately, the question is this, G drive (the SCSI drive) can no
longer be read by my system. Since then, I've loaded the drivers that came
along with the main board that control the Adaptec SCSI controller chip.
The installed software is able to recognize that an SCSI drive exists and
I've even been able to low level format using scsifmt and afdisk. On
further attempts of loading FreeBSD, it too has been able recognize that an
SCSI disk exists; formats and loads the CD ROM available software to the
SCSI drive. The AMI bios has only the capability of either enabling or
disabling the the SCSI feature, <Ctrl A> enters the SCSI bios during the
bootup prompt and from there, format utilities exist and have been tried as
well (these are nothing more than bios built in scsifmt or afdisk because,
these options have always been available even before Adaptec drivers have
been loaded). From what documentation I've been reading, I get the
impression that there are two ways of controlling my SCSI drive. Either
through the bios level or the DOS level. When FreeBSD reformatted the SCSI
drive, erasing the existing DOS format, my existing DOS system lost the
ability of contacting the G drive. Even something as simple as, format g:,
will not work.
I'm kind of a hobbyist. In fact my case is nothing more than an AT
case hack-sawed out and ground down with a drill to accept the ATX style.
In the process, I do not have any internal brackets that can hold any of my
drives, CD ROM etc. Therefore, everything rests next to my opened case and
fortunately, the ribbons and the ATX power supply cable are long enough to
attach to the mainboard. My main goal right now is to establish the
connection to my SCSI drive and then ultimately to install the FreeBSD. Any
advice is appreciated and you can e-mail me at: cramsay@top.net
Thanks,
Chris
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