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From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey)
Organisation: LEMIS, Schellnhausen 2, 36325 Feldatal, Germany
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Subject: Re: Install problem - HD read-only?
To: sathalye@qualcomm.com (Sanjeev Athalye)
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 1996 11:35:44 +0200 (MET DST)
Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org
In-Reply-To: <v02130500add2488aefb1@[129.46.104.151]> from "Sanjeev Athalye" at May 29, 96 11:37:45 am
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Sanjeev Athalye writes:
>
> I don't know if this one made it to the list before, but here it is:

It's the first time I've heard of it.

> I have a P5/166, 48Mb RAM, 2.1Gb IDE HD. The HD is partitioned as follows:
>
> DOS             400Mb
> FreeBSD       700Mb
> WinNT           900Mb
>
> The FreeBSD slice has /, SWAP, /var and /usr, with the / partition within
> 500Mb. The install works fine until after it asks for the install source
> (which is an MS-DOS partition). It then attempts to do the commit
> operation, and write the files, but comes back with a message stating that
> the HD is "read-only". It tries to copy the files, and says, "Wrote -1
> bytes ....". I have tried installing FreeBSD about 6 times, trying
> different things, but have always met with this stumbling block. Please
> help.

At a guess, it's getting confused by the disk geometry.  Did the
partition editor show all your DOS partitions correctly with the
correct size and type?  In any case, try again, and when it fails,
press Alt-F2.  This will show you a debug screen.  With any luck,
there will be a message there saying what's really hurting it.

Greg