Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 17:16:04 +0200 (MET DST) From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey) To: csidwell@ix6.ix.netcom.com (Charles Sidwell) Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Installation woes Message-ID: <199610101516.RAA03048@allegro.lemis.de> In-Reply-To: <199610091139.EAA22052@dfw-ix3.ix.netcom.com> from "Charles Sidwell" at Oct 9, 96 04:39:10 am
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Charles Sidwell writes: > > I hope someone can help. I've been trying to install UNIX of some > type for a while with no success. Upon buying a new computer I took my old > one, an IBM Valuepoint 486/DX2, 24mb Ram, 2 hard drives - not all that > shabby, and began preparing it for UNIX. > I first bought a RED HAT Linux OS, but was completely unable to get it to > recognize my cd-rom. Someone told me about FreeBDS. I bought a copy and > have began trying to get it installed. > I've tried every reasonable install option in the view menu-install from dos > w/ide cd-rom, install from floppy w/ide cd-rom, install.bat, nothing works. > The problem is that, after what I assume is building a kernel, No, it's just checking out the machine to see what it finds, and then it loads the installation program. From floppy it takes a while. > it goes to a > screen - Welcome to FreeBSD - with a list of options:Usage, DOC, and all of > the various install options:express, novice, etc. The problem is that at > this point my system seems to lock up - no keyboard, no mouse, nothing. I > can't even soft boot. > Any ideas? > > My configuration is: > one ide hard drive with a single dos partition (including the primary) > one ide hard drive with a partition for dos, and a large unused space which > I hope to use for UNIX. Just for this install I bought a tape backup, backed > up the drive, reformatted it, leaving the large unused, unpartitioned > segment for UNIX, and reloaded. > The keyboard is Enhanced, the mouse is PS/2 > my cd-rom is a Reveal GCD-R420 > > If anyone has any ideas on how to get this thing to work, I'd be grateful. Sounds like a hardware (compatibility) problem, especially if you can't boot Linux either. You should try hitting the Num Lock key: if it doesn't toggle the indicator LED, then you're really hung, or at least your keyboard is. You can see if you can get any response from the system by hitting the F2 key. If you do, you might get the error message output explaining why the installation doesn't want to continue. Since you have another computer, it might be instructive to try some comparisons. The most obvious one is swap keyboards and see what happens. Just occasionally we get a keyboard with behaviour we don't expect, and it's not unknown for a keyboard to hang as a result. Otherwise, try installing on the other machine, if that's easy enough (you could move the disk to the it, but if you want to install on the second disk, make sure it's the second disk on the other machine too). Also, if you can, boot from floppy and install from CD-ROM. It's by far the simplest, and the one with which you are least likely to shoot yourself in the foot. If that doesn't help, let's hear from you again. BTW, to check that the NumLock trick really does work at this point, I tried booting 3 machines from the boot floppy. Only the third one worked; one of the others hung in the boot, and the third tried briefly and then booted from hard disk. This isn't just a FreeBSD problem: I tried boot disks for about 4 different systems. I get the feeling that floppies are becoming even more unreliable. Greg
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