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Date: Wed, 04 Sep 1996 15:53:30 -0400
From: Gary Chrysler <tcg@ime.net>
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Organization: The Computer Guy
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To: "Paul T. Root" <proot@horton.iaces.com>
CC: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu, johnson@charming.nrtc.northrop.com,
        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: 2.1.5-RELEASE installation question
References: <199609041228.HAA02275@horton.iaces.com>
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Paul T. Root wrote:
> 
> In a previous message, Doug White said:
> >
> > On Tue, 3 Sep 1996 johnson@charming.nrtc.northrop.com wrote:
> >
> > > I have been trying to install Free BSD 2.1.5-RELEASE, and have
> > > encountered the problem described below.
> > >
> > > I did a minimal install from a DOS partition.  The install claimed to
> > > have completed successfully.
> > >
> > > Then, when I boot the machine, I get a rather lengthy list of devices,
> > > IRQ's, etc., and finally the following message appears:
> > >
> > > panic:  cannot mount root
> >
> > Hm.  My guesses are as follows:
> >
> > 1)  The kernel can't figure out just where the root directory is.  This
> > may be caused by the enhancer, as it's data area does not conincide with
> > the BIOSs and thus FreeBSD can't identify any disks.
> >
> > 2)  The wdc0 probe isn't finding any disks, period.  Watch the boot
> > messages for wd* devices and see if your disk & controller is found and
> > identified.
> 
> I have one other guess. He didn't say how he set up the disk slices. I'm
> going to guess that he split it in half and FreeBSD starts somewhere up
> in the 800-900 Meg range.
> 
> For EIDE drives, the root partition *MUST* be completely contained within
> the first 504Meg of the drive, due to the PC architectures BIOS limitations.
> 

That applies to all IDE bootable devices, Not just EIDE.

-Enjoy
Gary
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