Date: Sat, 12 Aug 1995 22:51:10 +0200 From: Bernard.Steiner@Germany.EU.net To: bugs@freebsd.org Subject: 2.0.5 install woes Message-ID: <199508122051.WAA03853@qwerty.Germany.EU.net>
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Folks, please bear with my ranting (yet again). I'd just like to point out some severe difficulties with the sysinstall as found on the 2.0.5 cdrom. My setup: wdc0: WD1009V ESDI controller wd0: 1223 cyl 7 hd 36 spt ESDI drive with approx. 16M DOS wd1: 967 cyl 9 hd 36 spt ESDI drive aha0: sd0: used up by up-and-running 2.0R cd0: st0: The first thing that happened was I tought, hey, why not use sd0b for swap, and use wd0 and wd1 for 2.0.5. Cool idea. So, what happened was that the existing disklabel on sd0, including the boot block, got nuked, and some terrible things happened to parts of sd0a. That was done by simply specifying sd0 as a possible target *without* actually telling sysinstall to try swapping on sd0b. Right, it says so on the screen :-( However, 2.0.5 did not install: -wd0 extending past cyl 1023 makes it impossible to use a single slice -making multiple slices and using yet another slice on wd1 utterly confuses the bad144 which seems to add up all the badsect locations and ends up wanting to access a location which would be somewhere in the middle of my desk, and not within the drives -telling sysinstall "hey, you dummy, there's 1223 cyl, and not 1224" never yields a fresh calculation of the total number available blocks -maybe the wizard option does some of the above, but that is not documented -existing partition and slice tables get nuked on every attempt to install -the bad144 list is re-constructed from scratch on every install attempt -the "bare essentials" installation includes /usr/include and /usr/lib/lib*.a and such junk and does not comfortably fit into any reasonable amount of space -automatic installation on wd1 does not appear to work (note, I *do* know how to boot wd(1,a)/kernel -c -s) -the kernels supplied on the cdrom hardly fits on a floppy. Fitting an additional /sbin/mount_cd9660 /sbin/init /bin/sh is absolutely impossible. -automatic disklabel is not cylinder-aligned when you use megabytes -automatic disklabel uses silly values for rpm, interleave, etc. -working aroud these so-called user-friendly installation features is getting increasingly more difficult Well, (as I mentioned before) I used to run 386bsd0.0 on that box, and I have actually overcome the obstacle of sysinstall. For future versions, would some kind soul *please* add a feature like reading configuration information provided by the user from a supported medium, such as an MSDOSfs fd1, tar st0, or whatever, where overrides to the self-calculated bogus numbers for disklabel, bad144 and fdisk can be kept. Oh, and while I'm ranting about the far-too big bare essentials bindist: How come /dev/MAKEDEV calls /usr/bin/chgrp (which may be on an disk not yet mkdev'd), and how come bad144 resides in /usr/sbin as opposed to /sbin ?! Well, it only took me a day to get 2.0R on sd0a back (what with having *no* running system at all), and a nice side-effect of this was that I now have 2.0.5 on wd0s2 and wd0s3 and a fresh wd1s2. I'll probably migrate towards 2.0.5... Thanks for the bad144 code, anyway. And the other goodies. Put please provide (just this once, for 2.1R, OK ?) an installation program that actually does what it is supposed to be doing. (Which Linux failed to do, and UNIXware failed to do, and all the *bsd versions upto now have failed to do, at least on my box.) And some *small* system that is able to mount the cdrom on a single floppy would be a definitive plus. Thanks for your time Bernard Bernard Steiner, EUnet Deutschland GmbH, Dortmund, vox +49 231 972 00 Emil-Figge-Str. 80, D-44227 Dortmund, Germany fax +49 231 972 1111 Bernard.Steiner@Germany.EU.net >>Geschwindigkeit ist reine Hetzerei.<<
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