Date: Fri, 2 Feb 1996 00:56:48 -0800 From: michelle@fishbone.com (Michelle Brownsworth) To: questions@FreeBSD.com Subject: Boot problem with new FreeBSD install Message-ID: <v01510100ad372119ff14@[206.101.70.11]>
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I'm having a problem getting a new FreeBSD installation to boot. A little background: In preparation for installing FreeBSD, I bought a new Western Digital 1.6 GB drive. It was to have one 528K DOS partition and the remaining 1+ GB was to be allocated to FreeBSD. Since I have an IDE CD drive that is unsupported, I XCOPIED the dists to the DOS partition's FreeBSD directory, and did a FreeBSD install from DOS. I opted to have the BootEasy boot manager installed in the boot blocks so I could boot either DOS or FreeBSD. Unfortunately, I had an older non-translating BIOS that was limited to 1024 cylinders (528K) without employing yet another boot manager that would trick the BIOS. So, I bit the bullet and upgraded to a translating BIOS. After it was installed, I booted the computer for the first time, got the BootEasy menu, and chose F2 (FreeBSD). But instead of booting FreeBSD, the menu kept reappearing with F? as the default. I went back to the documentation, in particular, the hardware troubleshooting docs, which addressed this very problem. It stated that the problem was most likely wrong disk geometry, and that the solution was to reinstall FreeBSD, taking care to ensure the geometry was correct. So I did that. The partitioning editor correctly recognized the drive geometry (3148 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors/track) and I proceeded to the label editor, and so forth through the rest of the install, which went fine. But when I rebooted and selected F2 from the BootEasy menu--uh oh--same problem. I went back and doublechecked everything--and I do mean everything--again, but no joy. So, I'm stymied. What should be a fairly straight-forward install has turned into quite a thrash... Anybody have any ideas? (BTW, the Walnut Creek subscription is under Adam Fishman's name; I am charged with the task of switching his server from BSDI to FreeBSD.) Thanks in advance, \\ichelle
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