From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Dec 1 14:24:42 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id OAA03173 for questions-outgoing; Sun, 1 Dec 1996 14:24:42 -0800 (PST) Received: from molhub.mol.net.my (aimsvan.mol.net.my [202.190.128.10]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id OAA03168 for ; Sun, 1 Dec 1996 14:24:38 -0800 (PST) Received: from pc-56kl1.mol.net.my by molhub.mol.net.my; Mon, 2 Dec 96 06:24:46 -0800 X-Sender: mfwong@mol.net.my X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.2 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: questions@freebsd.org From: Mun Fai WONG Subject: A few problems with motherboard and hard disk with 2.1R and 2.1.5R Message-Id: <32a2e6af676c002@molhub.mol.net.my> Date: Mon, 2 Dec 96 06:24:52 -0800 Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Hi, I have just bought an Asus P6NP5 PCI board and a Micropolis 4421 SCSI-2 hard disk drive. However, I have run into a few problems with 2.1R and 2.1.5R with the new parts. The following are the configurations of the system: Asus P6NP5 motherboard (on-board IDE controller, I/O) Intel Pentium Pro 200 32MB EDO RAM (non-parity) 1.44M FDD Adaptec 2940 PCI SCSI-2 controller Generic S3 Trio64 chipset PCI VGA card Micropolis 2217 and 4421 SCSI-2 HDD, Conner (540MB) IDE HDD SMC Elite16 combo Ethernet card 1) When I try to install 2.1.5R onto the new 4421 drive, I keep getting wrong geometry message, and at end of installation. Well, the installtion process itself is not quite a successful one as my August release CD-ROM for 2.1.5R has got a few dists with corrupted tgz files, including the base, ie the bin.?? ones. What I had to do was actually mount the live filesystem and manually copy those missing/corrupted files over to the filesystem afterwards. My questions are: 1) I bought the CD-ROM about more than 1 month ago, and this is the first time I used it, and I wonder if WC's warranty valids for that long ? 2) I bought the new 4421 disk just for FreeBSD, and as a result, I do not want to install a small FAT partition at the beginning of the disk and then later install FreeBSD on the rest of the disk. I wonder if anyone has the correct geometry information for this particular model, ie Micropolis 4421. 3) The other strange thing is that, when I have another Micropolis SCSI-2 drive (model 2217) chained to the SCSI bus, the boot-up messages reveals that, my 4421 is having the following geometry (4049/7/147 for C/H/S). I then use them as the geometry info in the partitioning manual during installation, but still get the same message saying incorrect geometry. Why ? 2) I used to have an SMC Elite16 combo card running well with an old ISA board. Now that I put the same card onto the new P6NP5, I keep getting messages saying "failed to clear shared memory 0xcc000, check configuration". The fact is that there is absolutely no other card on the board occupying that same mem address space. And I have verified that by pulling the card out, plug it into a DOS box, running SMC diagnose program, and make many changes to many different parameters, such as IRQ, RAM base addrss, base i/o. However, no matter what RAM base address I changes to, the next time I boot it up with FreeBSD, I got the above message complaining the new address. Can someone please kindly tell me what is going on, and if there is a solution to it. ANd finally, many thanks if you can kindly reply to the mail if you do have any clues to my problems. I do not have access to FreeBSD newsgroups with my current ISP now, 8-((. If someone know of any public NNTP server that carries FreeBSD groups, please kindly let me know too. Does freebsd.org have any intention of doing so ?