From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Feb 12 13:44:22 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id NAA03756 for questions-outgoing; Mon, 12 Feb 1996 13:44:22 -0800 (PST) Received: from zip.io.org (root@zip.io.org [198.133.36.80]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id NAA03751 for ; Mon, 12 Feb 1996 13:44:18 -0800 (PST) Received: (from taob@localhost) by zip.io.org (8.6.12/8.6.12) id QAA25694; Mon, 12 Feb 1996 16:43:04 -0500 Date: Mon, 12 Feb 1996 16:43:02 -0500 (EST) From: Brian Tao To: Michael Smith cc: Lague , questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Installation With Drive Overlay In-Reply-To: <199602110741.SAA27596@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk On Sun, 11 Feb 1996, Michael Smith wrote: > > Your caution is well-placed. FreeBSD is almost certainly not compatible > with this "Drive Overlay" product. I can say for certain that FreeBSD will not work with this setup, after spending an hour on a friend's machine last night installing FreeBSD, and five hours fixing it back up. :( > Installing FreeBSD will most likely result in an unbootable BSD > partition (best case) or totally destroy your DOS partition(s) (worst > case). This machine had an 850MB and 340MB IDE drives with the DDO drive manager. Figuring it was simply another boot manager, I went ahead and installed 2.1.0-R on the 340MB drive (second drive). Windows '95 was already on the 850. fdisk shows a small 128-sector partition on the 850MB drive. Curiously, it claimed that it started at sector -64 (yes, a negative number) and ended at sector +63. ;-) I should have stopped there, but my friend said he could always re-install Win95 if anything broke, so we pressed on. The installation itself went without a hitch. When the machine rebooted and ran DDO, all it could say was "Press spacebar to boot drive A:" and refused to recognize a bootable OS on the IDE drives. I stuck in the FreeBSD install floppy and was able to manually boot off wd(1,a}/kernel. Everything came up fine, including X, so I turned my attention to other work. In the meantime, my friend tried to re-install DDO on the first drive. I don't know the sequence of events over the next few hours, but he ended up with no Win95 partition and a "can't mount root" panic with FreeBSD. Someone else is working on the machine now, and I believe the latest effort has produced a working DDO manager running the OS/2 Warp boot manager, with only Win95 installed so far. To sum up: Just spend some extra money and get SCSI. ;-) -- Brian Tao (BT300, taob@io.org) Systems Administrator, Internex Online Inc. "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't"