From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Oct 20 20:51: 1 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail3.svr.pol.co.uk (mail3.svr.pol.co.uk [195.92.193.19]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5D62F14E53 for ; Wed, 20 Oct 1999 20:50:51 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jeanm@dupx.freeserve.co.uk) Received: from modem-151.name69.dialup.pol.co.uk ([62.136.194.151] helo=dupx.freeserve.co.uk) by mail3.svr.pol.co.uk with esmtp (Exim 2.12 #2) id 11e9FX-0002rO-00; Thu, 21 Oct 1999 04:50:47 +0100 Message-ID: <380E8D80.812946B3@dupx.freeserve.co.uk> Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 04:50:25 +0100 From: Jean-Mark Dupoux X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Annelise Anderson Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Installing from dos problem References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I started again by using fdisk in DOS to delete non-dos partitions and re-start the floppy boot from scratch (not absolutely necessary, but one way of making sure to make the right settings.) I was very much hoping this time to finally get round to a boot , after setting only wd0s1 to "bootable" in the partition editor > It seems that what you've done should be okay, but only the > FreeBSD partition (in dos terms) should be made bootable. It made > your second FreeBSD slice the bootable one (or perhaps the > dos extended parition) and that didn't work. I put 40 mb for , 91mb and 30mb on wd0s1, and 856 mb on wd0s4 in the labelling screen. > I don't know why you're wasting 160 megabytes on /. Little > happens there (except installation of new kernels and saving > of the old ones) and it really doesn't need to be that big. Unfortunately when it came to the install, I got hit by the same near instantaneous error message: > > "error mounting /dev/wd0s3 on /dist : invalid argument (22)" > followed by > > "user confirmation requested - unable to initialize selected media. > Would you like to adjust your media configuration and try again > YES/NO" > (A couple of retries brought no improvement to the results). As concerns stashing the ditribution files while re-arranging my partitions, > While you redo this stuff, where are > you stashing the distributions to install from dos? Or are > you resizing and moving? that is in fact a point I was already close to raising myself, since it might provide a nice alternative to the dos - partition method which has not worked so far. I understand that a system can be set-up from tape, but from what I could see, the dist. files would need to be loaded onto the tape initially using freebsd (or any UNIX ?) commands (or have I got this wrong?), so that they could be read back again afterwards. Obviously the drive needs to be supported too, but I am not sure either exactly here. The site handbook info makes it clear there are many varieties of QIC devices (and at least as many cartidge types and sizes), and although freebsd does support some of these, there is no list of specific models. The details of my 2 QIC tape drives are: 1 of 3.2gb H-P Travan drive on a (Iomega ditto-dash) floppy connector card, which writes to dc3000 mini-cartridge or TR3 1/4 inch 1 of seagate 800mb parallel port drive which writes to dc2010 mini-cartridge or TR1 1/4 inch Either drive should have enough capacity (based on space usage on the hard-drive) to load a basic distribution on a single cartridge, but I really dont have much idea of how I could load the files onto a tape so that they would be usable for an installation, since I have never used either drive before except with Windows or DOS based backup programs. Jean-Mark ps thanks for all the help on this so far, I really wish I knew what was going wrong myself. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message