From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jan 30 21:38:22 1995 Return-Path: questions-owner Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) id VAA01861 for questions-outgoing; Mon, 30 Jan 1995 21:38:22 -0800 Received: from netcom12.netcom.com (fod@netcom12.netcom.com [192.100.81.124]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) with ESMTP id VAA01854 for ; Mon, 30 Jan 1995 21:38:20 -0800 Received: by netcom12.netcom.com (8.6.9/Netcom) id VAA17187; Mon, 30 Jan 1995 21:36:42 -0800 Date: Mon, 30 Jan 1995 21:36:42 -0800 From: fod@netcom.com (Frank O'Donnell) Message-Id: <199501310536.VAA17187@netcom12.netcom.com> To: questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Problem booting from 2nd hard drive Cc: fod@netcom.com Sender: questions-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Sorry to bother you with a basic question, but I wasn't able to resolve this via the troubleshooting doc or the FAQ, etc. I'm attempting to install FreeBSD 2.0 on a 486DX2-66 with 16 megs of RAM and two Maxtor 7546 IDE hard drives, each with 522 MB. The first hard drive is taken up by an MS-DOS partition, while the second drive I just added to the machine today. I first used MS-DOS's fdisk to create a DOS partition on the new drive and formatted it for DOS just to verify that it worked. Then I booted from my FreeBSD boot disk which I created with rawrite.exe. Following the instructions in the TROUBLESHOOTING doc, I used the FreeBSD boot disk's fdisk to write a boot manager to the first (MS-DOS) hard drive so I could pick which OS to boot from when I powered up. Then I exited from fdisk and went back in and selected the second hard drive; here I deleted the MS-DOS slice, specified to use the entire disk for FreeBSD, and wrote an MBR to disk. I then went into the second utility to create partitions for root (/) (25 megs), swap (64 megs, anticipating future RAM upgrade), and for /usr (the remaining amount on the hard disk). (The root partition was at the beginning, so I don't think there would be a problem with it exceeding the max size the system could recognize). I then wrote this and went on to "Proceed"; at this point it said it was writing various things to the disk and finally told me to reboot to start from the hard disk (at which point I expected I'd use cpio to bring in the bindist files). When I rebooted, the boot manager from the first hard drive came up and asked if I wanted F1 DOS or F5 other drive. I chose F5. Now, at the "Boot:" prompt, per the instructions in the TROUBLESHOOTING doc I entered "hd(1,a)/kernel". Various status messages came up as it went through the boot routine and located various devices. Finally it said "panic: cannot mount root" and said it would automatically reboot in 15 seconds. I rechecked things a couple of times, rerunning the fdisk and the partition editing, to no avail. I did notice one strange message when I was trying to use the boot manager to switch to the second hard drive and boot. After picking F5 for other drive and entering "hd(1,a)/kernel)" at the "Boot:" prompt, I noticed that it gave a status message of "Booting wd(0,a)/kernel @ 0x100000". Now, I plead guilty to newbiedom, but if I entered "hd(1,a)/kernel", shouldn't it say it's booting from wd(1,a), not wd(0,a)? Thanks for any help -- I'm looking forward to trying out FreeBSD. Frank fod@netcom.com