From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue May 30 20:35:46 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id UAA02333 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 30 May 1995 20:35:46 -0700 Received: from alpha.dsu.edu (ghelmer@alpha.dsu.edu [138.247.32.12]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id UAA02319 for ; Tue, 30 May 1995 20:35:43 -0700 Received: (from ghelmer@localhost) by alpha.dsu.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) id WAA12433; Tue, 30 May 1995 22:35:41 -0500 Date: Tue, 30 May 1995 22:35:41 -0500 (CDT) From: Guy Helmer To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Announcing FreeBSD 2.0.5 ALPHA! In-Reply-To: <199505300844.BAA08337@freefall.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk On Tue, 30 May 1995, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of FreeBSD 2.0.5-ALPHA! And the people said, "Hooray!" > ... > NOTE: If you're installing directly from ftp you can simply grab the > boot.flp image from the floppies directory... It's an awesome installation process! However, I have tried installing it on a PC with an older 300MB ESDI drive that has several bad sectors; initially, I tried to just un-tar the distribution over my old 2.0-950412-SNAP filesystem (which had been installed over an old 1.1 installation), but the 2.0.5-ALPHA kernel complained that it couldn't mount the root partition because of a bad bad144 table. So, I did a complete install from scratch, set the "check for bad sectors" flag when I re-created the FreeBSD partition on the drive, and watched it work over the disk for about 3 hours (it found and added eight bad spots to the bad144 table). Then, the installation procedure hung after it installed the compat1x dist :-( To make a long story longer, I completed the configuration by hand (the handy shell on ttyv4 is great!), copied /kernel.GENERIC to /kernel, and tried to boot the system. Alas, the copied kernel wouldn't boot because of a read error on a particular sector; I booted with kernel.GENERIC, tried to cat /kernel to /dev/null, and it bombed with a read error on a block that was in the bad144 table (I double-checked the table, and the bad block was there...). If there isn't an obvious solution to the problem, I'll probably just wait 'till I can swap a SCSI or IDE drive for the ESDI. I don't have time to do much more debugging on the problem (I have to head to a couple of conferences, one of which where I've been invited to do a presentation on FreeBSD!), but I can boot the system and get the particulars on the layout of the slices and maybe get the location of the bad144 table if need be... > Jordan Thanks again for a great system and all the work that has been done, Guy Helmer Guy Helmer, Dakota State University Computing Services - ghelmer@alpha.dsu.edu