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Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 08:23:52 -0800 (PST)
From: Richard Childers <childers@best.com>
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I just heard that 4.2 was out and went to find a copy; ended up driving to
South San Francisco and finding it at CompUSA. It wasn't shrinkwrapped; I
note this in the hopes that those reading these words whom are involved in
the distribution can confirm whether FreeBSD is normally distributed taped
shut, or shrinkwrapped as more conventional 'wares tend to be ... even if
they are assembled in a box.

Moving right along, I took it home. It gathered dust for a day or two while
I played with a DSL router; then I backed up my laptop (running 4.0) and
started trying to install 4.2. That was 24 hours ago.

It didn'[t boot off CDROM. OK, maybe my laptop doesn't support El Torito;
I may have installed it using floppies last time, too. So I made some boot
floppies. I'm not new at this; I've been using FreeBSD since 2.2 and I've
been using (and administering) UNIX since BSD 4.2; hence my interest.

I used fdformat to triply-format my two floppies and then triply-copied the
images 'kern.flp' and 'mfsroot.flp' to the target diskettes, then I booted
them in the appropriate order. No errors were encountered in this process.

When it says

	Please insert MFS root floppy and press enter:

I insert the second diskette, and it says

	can't find '/mfsroot'

It then goes into the kernel configuration menu. Regardless of whether I trim
the kernel, or not, the sequence is the same: it proceeds to probe the bus,
then we see

	panic: no init
	syncing disks ...	# here comes that syncing feeling (-:
	done
	Uptime: 2s
	Automatic reboot in 15 seconds - press any keep to abort

<insert glyph of pumpkin gun [big brother to potato gun] accelerating laptop
 and FreeBSD 4.2 into low orbit ... unsuccessfully ... impatient, aren't we.>

Any suggestions?

Obviously the next step is to see if my diskettes boot on other laptops and
servers in the lab, as well as try other media, and see if the problem follows
the media or the platform ... but I thought I'd solicit feedback from any
fellow travellers (-: with similar problems.

I've perused the GNATS database and archives and do see some references to
problems with laptops, and, yes, I'll check the freebsd-nomads archives, to
see what laptop-specific gotchas exist ... and, yes, I'll pull the PCMCIA
cards out, now that I dust off the long-term memories I seem to recall this
was a problem with 4.0, also ... say, when is FreeBSd 4.3 due out ... and is
it code-named Tahoe ?  (-;


-- richard

richard childers
senor unix administrator
 & chief bottle washer


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