Date: Thu, 17 Aug 95 18:22:10 PST From: dbabler@orionsys.com To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Problems installing FreeBSD Message-ID: <9508171822.D5033Ou@orionsys.com>
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I have been unsuccessfully trying to install FreeBSD 2.0.5 to an older Dell
computer from the Walnut Creek CD-ROM for several days now. The computer is
an older 386DX20 with 6MB of RAM, an Eagle NE2000Plus NIC, a very old Denon
CD-ROM drive and 2 ESDI 150MB hard drives controlled by a Western Digital
WD1007A-WA2 controller. The PC runs DOS 6.2 and no network is installed when
the installation is attempted.
I've opted to install from a DOS partition on the second drive and have
successfully Xcopied all the relevant binaries there. The basic problem
comes from being totally unable to successfully install the file system
to the BSD partition/slice.
The 1st drive has a native geometry of 968 cyl, 9 heads and 34 sectors
per track. I've low-level formatted it to this setup several times. It
also supports translated geomtries of 968/16/17 and 293/16/63. After
low-level formatting, I use DOS FDISK to make the initial partition(s).
I've tried, with about equal non-success:
1. one large DOS primary partition, split later with FIPS.
2. one 60MB DOS primary partition, remainder undefined
3. one 60MB DOS primary partition, remainder DOS extended partition
with no logical drives defined.
After that stage, I then use DOS Format to format the active partition
and restore DOS files (and the O/S) to it so I can run the CD-ROM and
then run INSTALL.BAT.
All of my original installation attempts used the native 968/9/34 geometry.
When BSD boots, as part of the INSTALL.BAT program, it finds the controller
and identifies it as a WD1007 and finds both drives. The first drive is
probed as being 968/9/35 (not 968/9/34) but when I enter the partition
editor in BSD, the first drive is specified as 977/9/34. The debug log
(Alt+F2) also says:
wd0: invalid extended partition table: no magic
wd1: invalid extended partition table: no magic
If I leave the geometry set as it comes up, when I commit the install,
it encounters a hard write error attempting to write the partition or
boot manager and halts. If I manually set the geometry to 968/9/34 (or
967/9/343), and create a FreeBSD partition (either all of the rest of
the disk, which is 10,000 blocks bigger than the physical drive since
changing the geometry did NOT change what it thinks is the number of
mappable blocks, or only the number of actual blocks remaining) the very
best I've been able to make it do is fail when doing the bad block scan.
What it finds during the scan is that blocks 28, 63, 78, 133... are all
"bad" and eventually BAD144 faults. Basically, it is rejecting every
35th block and calling it bad. A real bad-sector scan of the entire drive
gives about 5-6 bad blocks. I've gotten it to successfully install the
boot selection manager, but that's it.
The release notes also indicate that it is supposed to be possible to
install into a DOS extended partition, but this does not seem possible
as you cannot label anything inside anything other than a FreeBSD slice.
I am pretty much at wits' end here with things to try, since I cannot
create the filesystem.
Thanks in advance.
-Dave Babler
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