Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2000 16:10:49 -0700 (PDT) From: Dane Bullerwell <dane_bullerwell@yahoo.com> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Mysterious Sysinstall Problems Message-ID: <20000410231049.10101.qmail@web1906.mail.yahoo.com>
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The Strange Case of The Malfunctioning Computer (or, Please Help Me, I'm Stuck in Windows!) ----------------------------------------------- I have a problem. I am receiving a plethora of strange errors when I attempt to use 4.0's sysinstall. [Please bear with me. I like to ramble.] To understand my problem I have to take you back. It all started when I slowly came to the realization that there was More Than Windows. That was about two years ago. So I bought a CheapBytes CD of Red Hat 4.2, and went to installing it. The installation program worked, sort of. I received all sorts of strange errors during installation, and had to run the program several times before the installation completed successfully. I wrote this off to Linux's supposed difficulty of installation. But it did work, and I was presented with a Linux login prompt. I got to work configuring my system, and eventually had a system that rivaled Windows. There *were* problems, though. Some programs always segfaulted. I thought there might be library problems, but simply re-installing the program would fix the problem! And installing a third time would re-create it! This disheartened me, leading me to believe that Linux wasn't much more stable than Windows after all. But I persisted. I finally gave up when I discovered that a) I could copy a file from one location to another, and get a different checksum; b) I couldn't gunzip the kernel source without a few bits being flipped the wrong way, and; c) the problems persisted with every Linux distribution I tried. I ran all sorts of RAM checking programs, thinking that I might have bad RAM. Everything turned up fine. I dual-boot Windows 95, and it's actually been quite stable for me. I tried disabling my external cache in my BIOS, with no success. I returned to windows, with my head hung in disgrace. A few months later, I decided to try OpenBSD. I spend a few days downloading 2.4, and was delighted to discover that it worked without problems. I eventually decided that OpenBSD wasn't for me, and bought a FreeBSD 3.1 CD. I installed it, and it also worked. My love affair with FreeBSD has gone on for over a year now. FreeBSD was my primary operating system, used for nearly everything. Until I decided to upgrade to 4.0 a few days ago. I decided to do a fresh install. Perhaps, in hindsight, this was stupid. But it's too late now. I backed up /home, /etc, /root, and /usr/local/etc, and prepared to take the plunge. Everything seemed to work beautifully during the install, until I reached the point where configuration began. Program after program sysinstall tried to invoke crashed with Signal 11. When I tried to log in to the unconfigured system, everything, from getty on down, also segfaulted. Again, I pondered some sort of library error. So I tried again. This time, I was informed that a script the sysinstall was trying to invoke was missing a closing quotation, or somesuch syntactical problem. That seems especially strange, since I had proceeded past that part of the install without a problem in the previous attempt. It's almost as if the copy from the CDROM to the temporary directory had not copied the file exactly. Undaunted, I tried again. This time, there were no segfaults or script errors. In fact, things worked beautifully. Until I attempted to install the Linux emulation files. About half way through, I received the following error: panic: ffs_alloccg: map corrupted In my fourth attempt, I wondered if it might be my CDROM drive, so I moved the disc to my CDRW drive and tried the install from there. Again, I received the map corrupted error. Sigh. Everyone tells me it has to be my hardware. I'm reluctant to believe this, because I ran 3.1 through 3.4 on this machine for over a year, stressing CPU and memory daily, with no problems. I remade the world several times. Windows 95 runs, relatively stablely compared to other Windows systems I've used. RAM checkers show up nothing. The sudden appearance of this problem in 4.0 raises a few questions. My current hypothesis is this: Linux, and post-4.0 FreeBSD mess around with memory differently than OpenBSD 2.4 and pre-4.0 FreeBSD. I really can't be any more specific than this, because I don't know enough about how operating systems work. It's kind of depressing, seeing an operating system I've come to know and love stop working on me so suddenly. For the record, my system includes the following: Intel Pentium 166 (MMX) 32 MBs of EDO RAM 3.2 GB Western Digital IDE HD (Windows Drive) 1.6 GB Fujitsu IDE HD GoldStar 32x CDROM Drive HP CD-Writer 8100 CDRW Drive Aztech Sound III Modem/Sound Card Creative SoundBlaster 16 El-Cheapo ISA SCSI Card for my Scanner I'll pop the hood and take a look at my motherboard, too, if you think that might be the culprit. The sad part about this whole experience is the fact that I'm too poor to go shopping for new RAM. If anyone out there takes pity on me, I'd be more than willing to accept gifts of hardware. ]=) Thank you ever so much for reading about my problems. I would appreciate any guidance you could provide, and I'd just love to answer any other questions you have. (Could you please CC: your ideas to my email address, in case I miss replies on the list?) Thanks for your time, and putting up with this somewhat vague and fairly long message, Dane __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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