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Date: Sat, 20 Jul 1996 16:02:13 +0200
From: Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl
Message-Id: <9607201402.AA16759=aeb@zeus-184.cwi.nl>
To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: installation fails
Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org
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	As Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl wrote:

	>  I have a rather
	> delicate setup with 3 IDE and 3 SCSI disks, and as far as I can
	> see there is no information at all about the precise properties
	> or configuration of this boot manager, so I answered No.

	> So my present question is: is there a way to let the installation
	> procedure make a boot floppy that boots a given partition?

	Not automatically, but you can manually boot.  Assuming your FreeBSD
	root file system is on the second SCSI disk (sd1), insert the
	installation floppy, then say at the Boot: prompt:

		4:sd(1,a)/kernel

	(The `4' means `5th BIOS disk'.)

Yesterday I decided that that couldnt work, but now that you
say it explicitly, I tried, and it doesnt work.
(Yields an infinite string of
	Error C:0 H:0 S:0
error messages.)

My BIOS only knows about disks 0 and 1, so anything booted
directly must come from there, or from floppy.
So, my Linux kernels live on disk 1 and get a boot parameter
to tell them which partition on which disk is to be mounted
as root directory.

I am searching for the way to communicate to a FreeBSD kernel
what device contains the root file system.

Booting from the install floppy I can choose the fixit item
in the menu and get a shell prompt, but it is really a very
meagre system one gets, hardly the way to run FreeBSD.

Being an absolute beginner with FreeBSD (although with 20+
years of Unix experience) I also experience a lack of
information. For example: what is the naming scheme for
disks and partitions and slices? The Handbook doesnt tell me.
Is there a man page?
I made some plausible guesses and sometimes mount accepted them,
sometimes not.
I have not been able to mount any non-ufs file system.
Attempts like `mount -t msdos dev dir' fail because mount
tries to execute /sbin/mount_msdos which doesn't exist.
But running /mnt/sbin/mount_msdos by hand also fails, I don't know why.

Andries