Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2001 23:03:57 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Oscar Ricardo Silva" <oscars@mail.utexas.edu>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Problems installing 4.x on large disks Message-ID: <001b01c0932f$a31b5f80$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010209103748.00b9e240@mail.utexas.edu>
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Hi Oscar, Support for gigantic IDE disks long ago became a terrible hack, the IDE standard definitions start to get really fuzzy after 8GB. It's a hodgepodge because some motherboards were designed after large IDE disks came out, others wern't and some people want to use giant IDE disks on old motherboards, others want to use them on new motherboards. The BIOS of the motherboard is responsible for presenting appropriate information about the disk drive to the boot loader. If it presents something weird the boot loader has to make some sense of it in order to find the /kernel file, and if the developer that wrote the boot loader code has never encountered your disk drive/motherboard combo.... Anyway, pardon me for being bigoted, but IDE disks have no place in a UNIX workstation. With supported PCI SCSI adapters as cheap as they are, I for one fail to see why people are willing to trade away gobs of performance for a few extra gigs of hard disk space. If running that 40GB disk drive on IDE is something that just has to be done, then buy a 2GB IDE disk off of Ebay for a few bucks and make it the master, and the mammoth IDE disk the slave. Otherwise, I can tell you the problem is in the boot loader code (I'm sure you already knew that) and anytime you want to experiment on getting it to work, you know where to find the sources! ;-) Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com > -----Original Message----- > From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG > [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Oscar Ricardo > Silva > Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 8:53 AM > To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG > Subject: Problems installing 4.x on large disks > > > 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 > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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