From owner-freebsd-hackers  Sun Apr 20 07:24:01 1997
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From: Wolfgang Helbig <helbig@MX.BA-Stuttgart.De>
Message-Id: <199704201359.PAA03394@helbig.informatik.ba-stuttgart.de>
Subject: Re: disklabel -- owner?
In-Reply-To: <199704200823.KAA02207@helbig.informatik.ba-stuttgart.de> from Wolfgang Helbig at "Apr 20, 97 10:23:24 am"
To: helbig@MX.BA-Stuttgart.De (Wolfgang Helbig)
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 1997 15:59:29 +0200 (MET DST)
Cc: imp@village.org, hackers@freebsd.org
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Hi again :-)
> Hi,
> 
> Installation paniced when it tried to write the partition tables to disk:
> 	"cannot go anywhere without init"
> or something similar.
> 
> We tried twice -- with standard MBR and "dangerously dedicated"
> selected.
> 
> Then we used LiLo -- Linux was living on another (IDE) disk -- to install
> an MBR and partition table.
> Linux and the freshly installed FreeBSD could read and write the SCSI disk,
> but the kernel loaded by LiLo paniced with
> 	"cannot mount root"
> (root was on sd0, the wdc-driver was disabled!)
> 
> It seems that during sysinstall and booting a geometry was used which is
> different from the one used by the disk-kernel.

This does not seem so any more, sorry about the wild speculation.
The geometry seems to have worked OK. To avoid the panic "cannot mount root"
we had to disable the IDE disk in the BIOS. We did that before installing
DOS to protect the IDE disk. Reenabling the IDE disk caused the kernel
and/or BIOS to get confused, so root on sd0 could not be mounted.
> 
> Finally we grabbed some DOS installation floppies, installed DOS, installed
> FreeBSD booted with standard MBR and everything went fine.
> 
> Wolfgang

Wolfgang