Date: Mon, 20 May 1996 08:56:53 -0700 From: fod@netcom.com (Frank O'Donnell) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Cc: fod@netcom.com Subject: Install problem w/ two hard drives Message-ID: <199605201556.IAA02742@netcom14.netcom.com>
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Last night I ran into a couple of problems installing FreeBSD 2.1 that I wanted to ask about here: I have a no-name 486DX2-66 with an older Mitsumi CD-ROM drive. There are two hard drives, a WD Caviar 1.6-GB and a Maxtor 540-MB, configured as master and slave attached to an EIDE card. The first hard drive has DOS, Windows, etc, on it. I want to install FreeBSD on the second hard drive and make this hard drive be devoted to FreeBSD. In addition, I want to install a boot manager on the first hard drive so that I can use F-keys to pick which drive to boot off of. I've done similar installations under FreeBSD 2.0.5 about a year ago, so I'm generally familiar with the process, but far from expert. I'm doing this install off the January 1996 FreeBSD 2.1 two-disk CD set. The automated install straight off the CD-ROM didn't get far, so I used makeflp.bat and proceeded from there. The install seemed to go quite smoothly, and I was impressed by the additional things that had been automated since 2.0.5. After accepting a default configuration of wd1, I then proceeded to do the X-user install, pick a few extra packages, configure the X stuff, etc. In this process I also told it I wanted a boot manager installed. The problems ran when I rebooted the machine. At the point where it would usually read the MBR from wd0 and ask which disk I wanted to boot from, the screen changed to 40-char-wide mode (haven't seen this in 12 years or so!) and came up with an error message about ROM BASIC not being available. Then I thought that I could boot from the install disk but then tell it to boot "wd(1,a)/kernel" at the appropriate point. After I entered this, I got exactly one "|" symbol and the screen froze. To at least partially recover from the MBR problem, I booted from a DOS disk and then used a Norton utility to make C: bootable, which at least enabled me to do DOS/Windows sessions. However, at this point I'm still unable to get to wd1 and FreeBSD (which I assume is installed correctly there). The only thing I can think that I did during the install which probably wasn't wise was that I answered "yes" when asked if I wanted the partition on wd1 to be a "true" partition. Since this disk is and always will be devoted only to FreeBSD, I gather that this minimally was unnecessary, and possibly may have introduced a problem. So: Could any suggest any ideas as to (a) why the boot manager install failed and what the easiest way to fix it is, and (b) does it look like there's another problem with wd1 which would seem to prevent booting from it? Thanks for any help! Frank fod@netcom.com
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