From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Feb 9 23:50:14 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from quail.swcp.com (dpm1-13.swcp.com [204.134.5.14]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AB28B37B4EC for ; Fri, 9 Feb 2001 23:49:55 -0800 (PST) Received: (from crs@localhost) by quail.swcp.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) id AAA00237 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Sat, 10 Feb 2001 00:49:22 -0700 (MST) Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2001 00:49:22 -0700 (MST) From: Charlie Sorsby Message-Id: <200102100749.AAA00237@quail.swcp.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Sigh... Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I give up... Is there a know problem with FreeBSD 3.4? I've been running 2.1.5 for a long time because I really hate trying to fix everything that gets screwed up when a new version is installed. I finally decided that I'd better update. I installed 3.4 from the Walnut Creek CDROM distribution. To permit me to try to set up 3.4 as I had 2.1.5 set up, I've kept 2.1.5--i.e. so I can boot to either. I'm sending this from 2.1.5. I had booted to 3.4 and was trying (as I have been) to get ppp to work. I also tried to install several versions of mahjongg. When I went to boot back to 2.1.5 (no success either with ppp or with either of two versions of mahjongg) I found one of the boot selector messages (I guess) that claimed I had no boot loader: >> FreeBSD/i386 BOOT Default: 0:da(0,a) /boot/loader boot: No /boot/loader If I leave it alone, it just sits there; if I enter , it repeates the same message. Thinking that the boot manager had somehow gotten munged, I tried re-installing only that but found there's no option in the installation software for that. Now, I find that (a) when I boot to 3.4 (see below) it claims I'm an unknown user but if I try to use adduser to add myself it says that crs is already a user (or words to that effect). Even stranger, if I try to log in as another user (hes), it says the same thing: crs Unknown user. Note: It doesn't say hes unknown user; it says crs unknown user. But if I try to log in as still another user, mes, it logs me in successfully. But back to the boot loader problem: I've found that a hardware reset will allow me to boot back to 2.1.5 even though the boot loader complaint still exists. I.e. instead of hanging indefinitely athe the "No /boot/loader" message, it proceeds (after a while) to boot. I didn't discover this until after I'd tried to re-install the boot manager and munged something in 3.4. I suppose that I'll have to re-install from scratch but doubt that that will solve my "No /boot/loader" problem. What now? Thanks for any help. Charlie Sorsby crs@swcp.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message