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Date:      Mon, 9 Oct 2000 19:55:50 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Rick Hamell <hamellr@heorot.1nova.com>
To:        Kerry Davis <kedavis@uswest.net>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: puzzlement
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0010091943250.10912-100000@heorot.1nova.com>
In-Reply-To: <0a9f01c03310$1ac782f0$0200000a@system>

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	Please reply to the list also, not just me... others may be able
to pick up where I may have left off, and cover things I may have missed.

> the problem isn't with booting off the floppies originally.  I guess I
> wasn't clear about that.
> 
> the problem is, AFTER I FINISH the install, and remove the boot floppies and
> the CD, my system won't boot.  Even if I set the boot option in the BIOS to
> "C: Only" it STILL goes to the floppy after power-on, and STAYS THERE.
> floppy light on steady, etc.  It doesn't appear to even LOOK AT the hard
> disk, where I just finished installing BSD, supposedly "successfully."

	Ahh..ok... did you install the Boot Manager then? It should come
up and give you an option of which partition to boot from. Also, double
check your jumpers on the drives. Make sure you're trying to boot off of
the primary master, you might want to pull out a MSDOS boot disk with
Fdisk and make the first partition active.


> The motherboard is a PCI board, with on-board IDE and Floppy.  I have two CD
> drives connected to IDE, but the actual "storage" for the system is SCSI,
> using a Qlogic 1080 SCSI card.  I'm using an IBM 2gig SCSI drive dedicated
> to the OS, and I have a Compaq/Seagate 36.4 gig drive for "mass storage."

	Ahh... I've had a similar problem with IDE and SCSI. Try
disabling the IDE controllers in the BIOS so that it can boot from the
SCSI. Right now the computer dosen't know which drive to boot off of.

> But frankly, the whole installation process - booting from the floppies,
> anyway - seems pretty sloppy and half-baked to me.  Even leaving aside the
> crashing-on-the-large-drive problem (what would I have done if that was the
> ONLY drive I had for my system?), once it gets to the "visual mode kernel
> configuration" screen, the floppy drive is spinning steadily until I get out
> of that.  If I started the boot/install and then had to go off for an
> emergency or something, it's going to sit there and spin the floppy for 24
> hours or whatever?  Just what I need.

	I personally have never seen the problem you're describing. I'd be
pointing fingers at your hardware based upon what you've already told
us. You might think about a BIOS upgrade to your motherboard, that may fix
part of your problem.

> Then the kernel configuration thing comes up with 4 SCSI interface options
> that I guess it "detected", NONE of which is what I actually have.  (It
> shows Advansys Narrow SCSI, two Adaptec options - one of them being a sound
> card with SCSI interface for CD! - and a Buslogic.)  As well as about 8
> ethernet card options, again none of which actually matches what I have, and
> a PC Card (PCMCIA) interface, which also doesn't exist in this system.

	Those are the most common devices out there, they're loaded by
default as a sorta 'one fits all' option. You're supposed to use the
Visual installation part to remove them and/or modify the settings to
match what you may have. As for your SCSI card... it's possible that it's
not supported... merely because nobody has had the time or the inclination
to write a driver for that paticular card.

> Sorry for the bitter tone, but I'm getting rather fed up with the whole
> thing.  Any suggestions you can offer would be greatly appreciated.  I've
> tried using two different sets of fresh floppies for the boot/setup thing,
> they both do the same thing.  Maybe this CD I got isn't really any good.
> Although it came from some kind of demo thing held in Texas I think,
> supposedly they were passed out by actual high-end BSD honchos, so you'd
> think the CDs would be known-good too, but the way things have been going
> maybe I shouldn't assume that either...

	Like I mentioned before, I seriously doubt it's the CD itself. I
think it's more of a hardware thing. Your system is getting confused with
IDE and SCSI without the BIOS able to tell it what to do. (BTW, FreeBSD
will automatically see the IDE ports, even if disabled in the BIOS... I
used that once to keep Windows from touching one of my IDE
drives... :) It's also understandable to feel frustrated... I deal with it
day in and day out. :) Feel free to continue asking questions if none of
my suggestions work, somebody else may also have other suggestions.


					Rick

Rick's FreeBSD Help Site! http://www.1nova.com/freebsd
Ace Logan's Hardware Guide http://www.shatteredcrystal.net/hardware
***FreeBSD - The Power to Serve! http://www.freebsd.org



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