Date: Mon, 18 Jan 1999 11:36:47 +0000 (GMT) From: "Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@a5.ph.gla.ac.uk> To: freebsd questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: New installation - some points and a problem Message-ID: <Pine.OSF.4.05.9901171429080.21423-100000@a5.ph.gla.ac.uk>
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Greetings; I'm far from being a newcomer to computer system admin, but I have to admit to being a complete newcomer to freebsd. I'm starting a project to install freebsd on an old-ish PC and I think I've solved a couple of points already, where the documentation might have been a little more helpful to newcomers. But now I seem to be stuck, so I thought I would raise these issues with the list. Background: the PC is an Elonex PC-425X, with two disks, the first one is 100MB and the second, 408MB. The previous setup had MS-DOS on the first disk, and an oldish version of slackware linux on the second disk, with LILO making the selection at boot-up time. This previous installation might be relevant as I explain later, which is why I'm mentioning it here. The plan was to install freebsd on the second disk instead of linux, while leaving MS-DOS alone on that old 100M disk. Installation method is FTP via an NE2000-comaptible ethernet card. Initially I was using the installer diskette 2.2.7, yesterday I moved to 2.2.8. So much for background. The first problem was, that at the "probing devices" stage, the display showed the "probing devices...may take a while" screen, there was some activity at first, and then it just sulked. Thinking that I had some device(s) in the PC that were causing problems, I went to a lot of trouble stripping things down to a basic system, but this made no change to the symptoms. Only then did someone suggest that by using ALT/F2 I could see how far the device probing was getting before it started to sulk, and this might give a clue as to what the problem was. When I did that, I could see that it was detecting the first disk, noting an MS-DOS file system, detecting the second disk, and then sulking. As a "stab in the dark", I made a wild guess that maybe it disliked what was already on that disk, so I used MS-DOS FDISK to re-assign the second disk (which had a linux swap partition and a linux file system on it) to be a single DOS partition, and then I reformatted it with DOS. Having done that, the installer proceeded to find the second disk _and_ find the DOS file system on it, and then was able to proceed to FTP installation. So there are my two points where I feel that clearer newbie installation documentation could have helped: * the use of ALT/F2 to view the progress of the device probing, * some mystery with the installer not understanding the linux filesystems that had been present on the second disk. OK, so then I applied the Novice installation procedure. I told it to use "A"ll of the second disk for the freebsd system using its automatic assignment. So far, so good. This seems to have been substantially successful, and it congratulated me on having installed freebsd. However, I find that I am unable to boot from hard disk. Perhaps there is even more than one problem. The normal PC boot brings up LILO as before, in spite of the fact that I _thought_ I had told it to install the freebsd boot manager. I suspect I may have misunderstood the instructions about that(?). If I boot from the installation diskette, and at the prompt, try to boot the hard-disk kernel by specifying 1:wd(2,a)kernel (am I right in thinking this should be possible, or not?) it gets some way into the startup, then just after it's found the two hard disks on wdc0, and noted the absence of wdc1, I see this: ---snip--- npx0: 387 emulator RTC BIOS diagnostic error 17<memory_size,invalid_time> changing root device to wd2s1a panic: cannot mount root syncing disks... done Automatic reboot in 15 seconds - ... ---snip--- This is where I'm stuck. What should I do now, please? best regards To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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