From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Sep 28 05:54:37 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id FAA04610 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Mon, 28 Sep 1998 05:54:37 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from alpo.casc.com (alpo.casc.com.casc.com [152.148.10.6]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id FAA04605 for ; Mon, 28 Sep 1998 05:54:33 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tnadeau@lucidvision.com) Received: from tnadeau ([152.148.24.194]) by alpo.casc.com (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with SMTP id IAA13524 for ; Mon, 28 Sep 1998 08:53:59 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <3.0.1.32.19980928085359.0099bb20@mailbox.casc.com> X-Sender: tnadeau@mailbox.casc.com X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Pro Version 3.0.1 (32) Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1998 08:53:59 -0400 To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG From: Tom Nadeau Subject: 2.2.7 Installation Problems -> Solutions Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG [ I posted to my original question to the mailing list last weekend. It was related to not being able to install 2.2.7 propery on my HP Vectra P133/32MB/2GB system. After apparently successfully installing onto the HD and rebooting, I was unable to boot the kernel. Some folks blamed the problem on a glitch in some FreeBSD installs which require a cold boot after install, while others thought that I was merely not booting from the correct device. The latter was closer, but still not exactly the fix I needed. I hope that this explanation helps anyone else out there who might be having the same installation woes as I did. I was quite frustrating for a while. ] Well, after about 4-5 additional hours of fiddling, I figured-out what was wrong with my installation. It turns-out that FreeBSD (incorrectly sometimes) assumes that your CDROM is wd1 and your primary HD is wd0. It seems to me that this assumption should be noted somewhere in the manual! Basically, if you reverse these two (as I had done), then all hell breaks loose. Firstly, FreeBSD's installer does not correctly determine the drive's geometry, therefore installing the whole mess in the wrong areas on the disk. This is noted as a potential problem in the manual as the boot loader printing "F? FreeBSD" during booting. If one continues here you will get the error of 'Error: 0x08 h:0 c:0 s:0'. After I realized that had happened, I swapped the ids of the devices and rebooted. This time it found the kernel, but crapped-out because all of the mount points were assumed to be on wd1 due to the installation. Not being able to find the section on creating devices, and being worried about not creating them correctly in the first place, I reinstalled. This time viola! It all worked. XFree86 even came up with my mouse on the first try. After playing a bit and customizing the kernel and package installations, my machine is running very well. --Tom To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message