From owner-freebsd-current Wed Jul 5 17:17:49 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mail.rpi.edu (mail.rpi.edu [128.113.100.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C0C2037BAD9; Wed, 5 Jul 2000 17:17:45 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from drosih@rpi.edu) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.acs.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by mail.rpi.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id UAA250012; Wed, 5 Jul 2000 20:17:42 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: drosih@mail.rpi.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <200007052218.PAA13242@mass.osd.bsdi.com> References: <200007052218.PAA13242@mass.osd.bsdi.com> Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 20:18:44 -0400 To: Mike Smith , mjacob@feral.com From: Garance A Drosihn Subject: Re: subtle problem du jour.... Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 3:18 PM -0700 7/5/00, Mike Smith wrote: >someone else wrote: > > The only time this showed up as problem was that when I reinstalled > > the loader (and related forth files), loader silently was not able > > to read /boot or /modules- the key word here is "silently". > > > > There ought to be a warning in loader(8) maybe about this? > >There would be a couple of ways to deal with the problem you're >seeing (in addition to the very worthwhile documentation) - > >a) bitch if the loader.rc file can't be found/read. > >b) bitch in the BIOS disk driver if an illegal read is attempted. > >Both of these might have given you enough clue to help find the >problem more quickly. Any comments, folks? Something along these lines might have saved me a few hours a week or two ago. I managed to create my partitions so '/' was the LAST freebsd in the slice I was installing into, instead of the first partition. This gave me some weird error messages when trying to start up. In my case the problem was that '/' started out past the 8-gig mark (even though the rest of the partitions were all before the 8-gig mark). I don't know how much work it would be to generate a specific enough error message, but in my case I didn't realize I had put the partition where I had put it. I was getting some kind of error message, but it wasn't specific enough to help jar me into looking at the right issue. Eventually one of my friends asked for some disklabel info, and then we were able to see where I had mixed things up. --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message