From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Feb 28 14:27:46 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id OAA26787 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Sat, 28 Feb 1998 14:27:46 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from dns.top.net (dns.top.net [204.214.28.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA26706 for ; Sat, 28 Feb 1998 14:26:42 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from cramsay@top.net) Received: from lizard (x2-46.top.net [207.239.216.66]) by dns.top.net (8.8.5/8.8.4) with SMTP id QAA29099 for ; Sat, 28 Feb 1998 16:24:46 -0600 Date: Sat, 28 Feb 1998 16:24:46 -0600 Message-Id: <1.5.4.16.19980228162818.1c3f55b4@top.net> X-Sender: cramsay@top.net X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.4 (16) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG From: Christopher W Ramsay Subject: FreeBSD, boot-up and SCSI. Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG First I would like to thank Doug White (dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu) and Greg Lehey (grog@lemis.com) for the problem I was having with my mail reader. I've set up and configured a new mail program, let's hope this clears up the matter. Further, thanks goes out once again to Doug White for his suggestion on installing the CD ROM as a slave to the primary EIDE control port. His suggestion cleared up the problem I was having with FreeBSD not being able to read my Sony CD ROM. I now have further set-up problems and actually may not be related to FreeBSD, but it might be worth the e-mail for advice. My main board has SCSI built in. I had an old 411 MB SCSI hard drive that I could devote entirely to the installation of FreeBSD. The main board and DOS were able to read the SCSI drive and assign a drive letter w/o having to install any of the driver software. This was due I believe to the fact that the SCSI hard drive had already been formatted in DOS. I install FreeBSD with the boot manager option on the SCSI drive then reboot. The C drive has remnants of boot manager from previous attempts of FreeBSD installations on the C drive. The machine reboots, shows the boot manager menu: F1 DOS, F2 FreeBSD. F5 brings up my original system set-up which includes E-Z drive. My D and E drives are actually two logical drives on one 3.1 gig Western Digital. If I press F1, the boot-up bypasses the EZ-bios boot sector and loads everything in autoexec.bat and config.sys reading only A, B, C and F (my CD ROM). Ultimately, the question is this, G drive (the SCSI drive) can no longer be read by my system. Since then, I've loaded the drivers that came along with the main board that control the Adaptec SCSI controller chip. The installed software is able to recognize that an SCSI drive exists and I've even been able to low level format using scsifmt and afdisk. On further attempts of loading FreeBSD, it too has been able recognize that an SCSI disk exists; formats and loads the CD ROM available software to the SCSI drive. The AMI bios has only the capability of either enabling or disabling the the SCSI feature, enters the SCSI bios during the bootup prompt and from there, format utilities exist and have been tried as well (these are nothing more than bios built in scsifmt or afdisk because, these options have always been available even before Adaptec drivers have been loaded). From what documentation I've been reading, I get the impression that there are two ways of controlling my SCSI drive. Either through the bios level or the DOS level. When FreeBSD reformatted the SCSI drive, erasing the existing DOS format, my existing DOS system lost the ability of contacting the G drive. Even something as simple as, format g:, will not work. I'm kind of a hobbyist. In fact my case is nothing more than an AT case hack-sawed out and ground down with a drill to accept the ATX style. In the process, I do not have any internal brackets that can hold any of my drives, CD ROM etc. Therefore, everything rests next to my opened case and fortunately, the ribbons and the ATX power supply cable are long enough to attach to the mainboard. My main goal right now is to establish the connection to my SCSI drive and then ultimately to install the FreeBSD. Any advice is appreciated and you can e-mail me at: cramsay@top.net Thanks, Chris To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message