From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jun 19 11:28:46 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from corinth.bossig.com (corinth.bossig.com [208.26.239.66]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B20C337B5BF for ; Mon, 19 Jun 2000 11:28:42 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kstewart@3-cities.com) Received: from 3-cities.com (unverified [208.26.241.153]) by corinth.bossig.com (Rockliffe SMTPRA 4.2.2) with ESMTP id ; Mon, 19 Jun 2000 11:00:34 -0700 Message-ID: <394E5FA2.D9FC37E9@3-cities.com> Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 11:00:02 -0700 From: Kent Stewart Organization: BOSSig (BOSS Internet Group) X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Steve Neuharth Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: can't load kernel (?) References: <394A53EF.A36C3FE1@webhelp.com> <394A7DF7.BBFBD5D7@3-cities.com> <394E1DCD.7A08BB0D@webhelp.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Steve Neuharth wrote: > > Kent Stewart wrote: > > > > Steve Neuharth wrote: > > > > > > I've installed FreeBSD 4.0 on a Compaq Proliant 1600... the install runs > > > fine till I reboot. > > > > > > I get.... > > > > > > Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf > > > Unable to load kernel: > > > Aborted! > > > / > > > Hit [Enter] to boot immediately or..... > > > Booting [kernel]... > > > can't load 'kernel' > > > I even tried compiled a custom kernel and installed it before > > > rebooting... no luck. I installed the latest SoftPaq BIOS upgrade for > > > the hardware. RedHat6.2 installs and boots fine (but I'd rather use > > > FreeBSD, of course). > > > Any Ideas?... anyone? > > I would think at first that you have a / partition that extends beyond > > cylinder 1023, which is ~8.4GB. You didn't give us any information as > > to your system structure, i.e., HD's and which drive you are > > installing FreeBSD on. > > I've got 3 SCSI drives installed.... one 9.1 Gb and two 18.2 Gb. The 9 > Gb drive (idad0) has the system on it... sliced up with 100 Mb /, 50Mb > /var and the rest is /usr. I've made the two 18 Gb drives one big-ass > raid 0 volume (idad1) with the compaq RAID config software.... which is > mounted an /usr/local/ftproot. I do not currently have the Compaq system > Partition installed on the file system (for simplicity's sake). > > > BTW, you can have a fairly large FreeBSD slice but you have to have / > > separated from the other filesystems. My / is 100MB and is 1st > > partition in all cases. I have the 4.0 slice installed in the 2nd HD > > partition in one system and as the 3rd partition in another. They are > > all on drive ata0 and the FreeBSD slice covers the break point of > > cylinder 1024. > > How does this 1024 cylinder thing work?.... /root must not cover this > cyl? must be smaller than 0-1024? I thought that this was an IDE only > problem. This type of problem seems to be a possible cause of my > probs... since I can boot off of CD and floppy.... I don't think that it > is the kernel itself, rather the way the kernel is being read off of the > volume... bear in mind that I'm using Compaq's SmartRAID Software to > configure my drives. I thought all pure scsi drives would be da0s1 and not idad0. That would make your kernel try to load it from the wrong device. I don't know for sure but a boot is a boot and 1024 is the end of the line for the chs address scheme. I don't think that matters if you are using scsi or ide. When / is a 100MB like yours is, it is pretty easy to get it under cylinder 1024. With out LBA or the equivalent, 1024 is around 520MB. You usually have 1GB+ support turned on at the scsi level and that is the equivalent of LBA. The IDE HD's all lie when it comes to the hardware anyway. It is just how they lie that makes the difference. I think a single platter IDE is now at ~8GB and the CHS for the drive is all logical. I have my FreeBSD setup on IDE drives and the main drive's FreeBSD slice is larger than 8.4GB in all cases. I just arranged things such that / is the first partition in the slice and it automatically falls under the cylinder 1024 rule. Since you are using scsi, someone else with a similar setup may have an idea why you can't boot. Kent -- Kent Stewart Richland, WA mailto:kstewart@3-cities.com http://www.3-cities.com/~kstewart/index.html FreeBSD News http://daily.daemonnews.org/ SETI(Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) @ HOME http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message