Date: Fri, 19 Jan 1996 01:07:13 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: gtc@aloft.att.com (gary.corcoran) Cc: bugs@freebsd.org, jkh@freebsd.org Subject: Re: panic: vm_bounce_alloc during initial installation (writing disk info) Message-ID: <28846.822042433@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 18 Jan 1996 13:32:34 EST." <9601181832.AA08896@stargazer>
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> Thank you for not letting this fall through the cracks - since I hadn't > heard back anything after the intial couple of immediate replies, I was > afraid my problem was long forgotten... Not at all. I do save these messages, and though it may sometimes take me a month or two to go back over the many-hundred message backlog when I've still got hundreds more coming in every day, but I do. Your problem, and the suggested cause, is frankly somewhat bizarre and basically the reason nobody has really had much in the way of help to offer. They're all still scratching their heads. If you're game, might we try a little experimentation in an effort to narrow this down somewhat? > And my answer was yes - my partition size *is* just over 500MB. > The location of the partition, which might be significant, is at the end > of a 4GB disk. If I recall, however, I believe the end of the partition was > just _under_ the 4GB boundary. 500MB at the end of a 4GB disk, eh? And I imagine that this disk is having its geometry being seriously translated in order to keep that FreeBSD partition below cyl 1024. Hmmm. First thing to try: Get a small SCSI drive somewhere, whether begged, borrowed or, erm, borrowed and try a FreeBSD-only install. There's a whole chunk of your system that's not being tested here and it seems to be hanging up entirely on one lousy disk drive. Yes, it's a fine 4GB disk drive and I can certainly see how you'd want to use it in the final configuration, but this is experimentation. We need to know if large drive + DOS sharing + aggressive geometry translation is what's messing us up, or if it's really some sort of bizarre boundry condition. Easiest way of getting more data on this is to substitute in another disk for testing. If you can't do that, or are more motivated to solve the core problem through more purposeful experimentation, then the very next thing I'd do is turn the geometry translation off and try another FreeBSD install, only this time *over* the DOS partition. Yes, I'm sure you're attached to your DOS partition, but it may very well be that you can solve this problem by swapping the orders around. Back up your DOS, then see if FreeBSD likes the drive all by itself and untranslated. If it does, try it with the drive all to itself and translated. If it still likes it, see if it likes being first on the drive with DOS following. If that works, you're basically running. If it doesn't, try seeing if you can stick DOS below cyl 990 or so without translation, then create a small slice that's about 20MB or so and also starts and stops below cyl 1024, you can put your root partition on this slice and boot just fine. The second slice can point to the >1024 cyl portion of the disk since by the time FreeBSD is booted, it's now seeing all cyliders of the disk due to its lack of BIOS limiations. If all of this is still too hard, then I really recommend investing in another small drive just for booting DOS and FreeBSD from - split it between them or something. Then your second, big 4GB, drive can become `D:' for DOS and your other filesystems for FreeBSD. Since FreeBSD doesn't need to boot off of this drive, you can stick its own portion of the big disk anywhere after cyl 1024. > different PCs, I was never able to successfully install FreeBSD. And this wa s > even _after_ I had bought the hardware to assemble my new PC *specifically* t o > be compatible with what FreeBSD supported! I'm looking forward to trying out Well, if you don't mind my saying so, it does rather sound as if you've a little foolishly allowed the lack of a $200 spare disk drive to cost you some $20,000 in grief and lost hair over the last 2 years. This is PC hardware, and some flexibility is frequently required on both sides to reach accomodation! Sometimes that means throwing money at certain problems until they go away. Since PCs are generally a lot cheaper than their workstation counterparts, even with more money thrown at problem spots, they still usually come out quite a bit cheaper. I've completely overhauled and replaced every component in my own main PC about 4 times now.. :-) Jordan
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