From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Sep 3 10:50:24 1995 Return-Path: questions-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) id KAA23850 for questions-outgoing; Sun, 3 Sep 1995 10:50:24 -0700 Received: from main.statsci.com (main.statsci.com [198.145.127.110]) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) with SMTP id KAA23842 for ; Sun, 3 Sep 1995 10:50:06 -0700 Received: by main.statsci.com (Smail3.1.29.1 #3) id m0spJB5-000r3uC; Sun, 3 Sep 95 10:49 PDT Message-Id: To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: problems with initial FreeBSD (2.0.5 CD) installation attempts In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 31 Aug 1995 13:51:31 -0700." Reply-to: scott@statsci.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 03 Sep 1995 10:45:48 -0700 From: Scott Blachowicz Sender: questions-owner@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk Scott Blachowicz wrote: > I've been experiencing a bunch of weird stuff after installing FreeBSD on my > system, so I've been reinstalling it (which is REAL easy from the CD) in > attempts to get things cleared up. Boy I hate it when I do bone-headed things like this. I finally ran across a 'fsck' failure when booting into Linux that lit the "Aha!" light in my head. Turns out that when I rearranged my partition usage, I forgot to edit the /etc/fstab in my Linux tree. That combined with typing 'shutdown -fr now' (i.e. a "fastboot") a few times led to some interesting file system corruptions when Linux mounted my FreeBSD partitions under the old assumptions as to their use. That discovered, I have a couple of curiosity questions. 1) When installing the emacs-19.28 package from the 2.0.5R CD, I get this error: Projected size of 24276116 exceeds free space in (null). Not extracting /cdrom/packages/All/emacs-19.28.tgz Is that a bug in pkg_manage or in the emacs-19.28 packaging? 2) Upon booting, I get this message right after the Boot: prompt and "text=0x..." message: BIOS basemem (637K) != RTC basemem (640K) I'm not really a PC person and was wondering if that message is something to worry about? 3) During bootup, I get this message (presumably mounting one of my 3 DOS partitions): mountmsdosfs(): root directory is not a multiple of the clustersize in length Is that something to worry about? Maybe only if I mount the paritions 'rw' (which I probably do)? 4) In doing a bunch of reinstalls & fiddling with UserConfig mode in bootup, I was wondering why 'enable' & 'disable' can't take multiple devices or globbing patterns. That way, I could disable a bunch of them in one fell swoop...'disable ah* bt0 lnc*' 5) Is there a way to make a simple boot floppy from the sysinstall process? There were a couple of times when I really wanted to boot (to an MFS root?) to do some simple repairs on the disk. So, how DOES one go about doing that? Or do I have to do a Minimal install from sysinstall, then switch over to the holographic shell in VT4 to do anything? I think I've seen that suggested as the "fixit floppy" alternative (I think I've probably missed some messages on that subject recently). 6) I notice that when booting with something like 'fbsdboot -D ...\kernel', the path to the kernel file makes it into the boot process somewhere (like the '-c changes' recording?). It looks like it uses /sbin/dset to do the recording. Is it possible to get at the path that got used for the kernel from, say, /etc/rc.local, so I could do something with it? In my Linux setup, I boot with 'loadlin' (roughly equivalent to 'fbsdboot' in this case) and I've got stuff in my boot sequence to stick a symlink to the boot kernel in /vmlinuz. I was wondering if I could (or should) do something similar for putting a symlink like this: /kernel -> /c/freebsd/kernels/mykernel.001 or some such silliness. I'm not really sure how long I'll continue to do this sort of thing, so it's not really that big a deal, but I'm just curious. Thanks muchly, Scott Blachowicz Ph: 206/283-8802x240 StatSci, a div of MathSoft, Inc. 1700 Westlake Ave N #500 scott@statsci.com Seattle, WA USA 98109 Scott.Blachowicz@seaslug.org