Date: Mon, 12 Feb 1996 16:43:02 -0500 (EST) From: Brian Tao <taob@io.org> To: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Cc: Lague <lague@hargray.com>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Installation With Drive Overlay Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960212163336.17712G-100000@zip.io.org> In-Reply-To: <199602110741.SAA27596@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
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On Sun, 11 Feb 1996, Michael Smith wrote:
>
> Your caution is well-placed. FreeBSD is almost certainly not compatible
> with this "Drive Overlay" product.
I can say for certain that FreeBSD will not work with this setup,
after spending an hour on a friend's machine last night installing
FreeBSD, and five hours fixing it back up. :(
> Installing FreeBSD will most likely result in an unbootable BSD
> partition (best case) or totally destroy your DOS partition(s) (worst
> case).
This machine had an 850MB and 340MB IDE drives with the DDO drive
manager. Figuring it was simply another boot manager, I went ahead
and installed 2.1.0-R on the 340MB drive (second drive). Windows '95
was already on the 850. fdisk shows a small 128-sector partition on
the 850MB drive. Curiously, it claimed that it started at sector -64
(yes, a negative number) and ended at sector +63. ;-) I should have
stopped there, but my friend said he could always re-install Win95 if
anything broke, so we pressed on. The installation itself went
without a hitch.
When the machine rebooted and ran DDO, all it could say was "Press
spacebar to boot drive A:" and refused to recognize a bootable OS on
the IDE drives. I stuck in the FreeBSD install floppy and was able to
manually boot off wd(1,a}/kernel. Everything came up fine, including
X, so I turned my attention to other work.
In the meantime, my friend tried to re-install DDO on the first
drive. I don't know the sequence of events over the next few hours,
but he ended up with no Win95 partition and a "can't mount root" panic
with FreeBSD. Someone else is working on the machine now, and I
believe the latest effort has produced a working DDO manager running
the OS/2 Warp boot manager, with only Win95 installed so far.
To sum up: Just spend some extra money and get SCSI. ;-)
--
Brian Tao (BT300, taob@io.org)
Systems Administrator, Internex Online Inc.
"Though this be madness, yet there is method in't"
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