Date: Thu, 31 Aug 1995 13:51:31 -0700 From: Scott Blachowicz <scott@statsci.com> To: questions@freebsd.org Cc: scott@statsci.com Subject: problems with initial FreeBSD (2.0.5 CD) installation attempts Message-ID: <m0soGaE-000r3yC@main.statsci.com>
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Hi-
I've been experiencing a bunch of weird stuff after installing FreeBSD on my
system, so I've been reinstalling it (which is REAL easy from the CD) in
attempts to get things cleared up. My system looks like this:
* Pentium-90; 16Mb RAM; 256K cache
* ASUS P/I-P55TP4XE motherboard with Triton chipset & Award 4.50PG BIOS
(previous MB died, this is my new one) w/onboard IDE, FDC, 2S/1P
* ATI Mach64 video w/2Mb
* NCR 8150S PCI SCSI card (based on 53c815 chip - same as 810, but with it's
own onboard BIOS instead of relying on the MB having it)
* SoundBlaster AWE 32 (IRQ 5)
* network card that can do NE2000 or WD emulation (I've got it set for NE2000)
(IRQ 10)
* Seagate 1Gb IDE drive (31220N...I don't remember for sure)
* Quantum 1.4Gb Empire SCSI drive
* Toshiba 3501 4x CDROM drive
* (external & powered off thru all this) Exabyte EXB-8200 8mm tape drive
* old Gateway-2000 keyboard (I keep meaning to swap it for one of the newer
ones that I have access to)
I think that's all the relevant stuff (and not-so-relevant). I have had the
discs laid out like this (as reported by pfdisk):
IDE disk: C/H/S BIOS=524/64/63; Controller=2099/16/63
# ID 1st Last Name Start,length My comment
1 6 0 189 DOSbi 63,766017 C:\
2 165 190 249 unkno 766080,241920 fbsd root & swap?
3 6 250 523 DOSbi 1008000,1104768 E:\
4 0 0 0 empty 0,0
SCSI disk: C/H/S=1009/43/63
1 6 0 90 DOSbi 63,246456 D:\
2 165 91 165 unkno 246519,203175 fbsd swap & more?
3 165 166 506 unkno 449694,923769 fbsd /usr
4 131 507 1008 unkno 1373463,1359918 Linux
I've tried various combinations of deleting sd0s2 & sd0s3, then creating a
sd0s2, but that left me without a sd0s3 at all, which I thought might have
caused a problem (having partitions 1,2,4 with no 3). My original intent was
to do this:
** have / & some misc stuff on the wd0s2 slice.
** use the sd0s2 slice as a swap partition for both Linux & FreeBSD.
Presumably this would involve laying a disklabel on it (I seem to remember
Joerg Wunsch describing this recently) from /etc/rc* somewhere.
** use the sd0s3 slice for my /usr partition.
** eventually, when my paranoid visions of everything blowing up in my face go
away, either reduce the size of or eliminate the Linux partition and use it
for FreeBSD instead.
Now, some of the things I've been noticing through various installation
attempts with either 2 partitions or 1 partition on sd0 and using different
boot methods (either booteasy, os-bs20b8 or fbsdboot - all as shipped on the
2.0.5 CD).
1) I got the error involving EMM386 when I tried to use the INSTALL.BAT on the
CD. I commented out my 'EMM386 NOEMS' line in config.sys...I just inherited
that line from someone else's setup & don't really understand what it's for. I
guess I will when something else blows up.
2) Booting with INSTALL.BAT ('fbsdboot -D kernel') hangs after the initial
"Text=..." line. So, I created a floppy & boot from that no problem.
3) When I 'q' out of the FreeBSD fdisk editor for my wd0 disk, I get the
message box saying "Max one 'fat' allowed as child of 'whole'". Is this a
remnant of pre-slice code? (should I be worried about the error?)
4) Upon booting, I get
mountmsdosfs(): root dir is not a multiple of clustersize in length
Is that something to worry about?
5) At one point, when booting I got a bunch of errors that looked something
like this:
mem: Bad File Descriptor
for a bunch of the files in /dev. After I got in, I could do an 'ls' of /dev
and see the names, but doing an 'ls -l' produced the above error. Reinstalled
OS.
6) At one point, I booted and the /dev directory was gone, somehow.
Reinstalled OS.
7) Generally, when done with installation and doing the reboot gets the 'done'
on syncing the disks, but it hangs. I have to hit the Reset button to get the
reboot thru. Could this be a symptom of some problem?
8) I've noticed several odd pauses...I think it was due to the ed1 probe
finding my SoundBlaster card at IRQ 5. Now I try to do UserConfig to do 'irq
ed1 10'.
9) My next-to-last installation started screwing up after I'd installed my own
kernel (cp GENERIC MYKERNEL & only comment out a few devices - like network
cards I'm not using - and change ed1 to irq 10). It boots through all the
probes, then dies when it can't find /bin/sh. No /bin/sh kinda puts a crimp in
the boot process. :-( Reinstall.
10) My latest installation was to try putting the root on my sd0 instead of
wd0 (thinking maybe there's a problem in the difference between the BIOS &
controller geometries, maybe I can boot from sd0). I haven't quite gotten this
one to boot yet...maybe my root wasn't in the compatibility slice? But os-bs
is set to the partition, but the boot fails. I need to investigate this one
more.
11) The BIOS has some "green" features...should I disable the IDE HDD power
down modes? Should I do anything with any of the other BIOS settings?
I've been trying enough variations that my mind is going numb, so I figured
I'd make a plea for some suggestions on ways to focus my efforts here. This is
my first attempt at doing anything with FreeBSD, so maybe I'm misunderstanding
something, forgetting some little detail or something.
Any suggestions, pleas for additional details would be greatly appreciated!
Thanx,
Scott Blachowicz Ph: 206/283-8802x240 StatSci, a div of MathSoft, Inc.
1700 Westlake Ave N #500
scott@statsci.com Seattle, WA USA 98109
Scott.Blachowicz@seaslug.org
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