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Date:      Fri, 09 Feb 2001 10:52:38 -0600
From:      Oscar Ricardo Silva <oscars@mail.utexas.edu>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Problems installing 4.x on large disks
Message-ID:  <4.3.2.7.2.20010209103748.00b9e240@mail.utexas.edu>

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At first I thought I was the only one having problems installing FreeBSD on 
machines with large disks.  Looking through some newsgroups and the mailing 
list archives, I've found that more and more people are having problems, 
but unfortunately, I haven't found any solutions.  The basic problem is 
that the operating system is installed on a large disk.  First the 
partitions are created, then the slices, and finally the files are copied 
over.  Then, on reboot, a message looking something like this comes up:

No  /boot/loader

 >>FreeBSD/i386 BOOT
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/kernel
boot:
No /kernel

 >>FreeBSD/i386 BOOT
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/kernel
boot:


Some of the suggestions to previous questions of this type suggested that 
the problem might have something to do with the 1024 cylinder limit.  But 
from my reading of the latest release notes, this is no longer an 
issue.  I've tried entering the boot commands by hand at this prompt but 
still no boot.  And I've booted off of the live filesystem disk and I can 
see that there is a "/boot" directory and that "/boot/loader" as well as 
"/kernel" does exist.

Here's the other thing I've seen in some of these similar 
messages:  installation of Linux (mostly Red Hat), happens without a 
problem.  I have two identical machines, one currently running Red Hat 
Linux 6.2 and on the other one I'm attempting to install FreeBSD.


Any thoughts/suggestions/recommendations?  Even though the release notes 
say the 1024 cylinder limit is no longer a problem, I've tried doing the 
install with a / of as little as 50MB and still the same problem.  Here are 
some details of the computer I'm working on:


The machine is a 650MHz Pentium III, with 256MB of RAM one 3COM PCI 
3C905C-TX and the following disk configuration:

	Primary master:		IBM DPTA-373420
	Primary slave:		IBM DPTA-373420
	Secondary master:	IBM DPTA-373420
	Secondary slave:	Toshiba CD-ROM

The IBM drives have a capacity of 32864MB.  In the BIOS, I've tried setting 
the mode on the disks to:  Auto, LBA and LARGE.  In addition, when using 
FDISK in the install, I set each disk to dangerously dedicated.  The 
operating system is installed on the primary master.  I've also played 
around with the size of the root partition, initially setting it to 5GB but 
now going down to 2GB.  After each install, we get the same error mentioned 
above.




Oscar



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