Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2001 10:52:38 -0600 From: Oscar Ricardo Silva <oscars@mail.utexas.edu> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Problems installing 4.x on large disks Message-ID: <4.3.2.7.2.20010209103748.00b9e240@mail.utexas.edu>
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At first I thought I was the only one having problems installing FreeBSD on machines with large disks. Looking through some newsgroups and the mailing list archives, I've found that more and more people are having problems, but unfortunately, I haven't found any solutions. The basic problem is that the operating system is installed on a large disk. First the partitions are created, then the slices, and finally the files are copied over. Then, on reboot, a message looking something like this comes up: No /boot/loader >>FreeBSD/i386 BOOT Default: 0:ad(0,a)/kernel boot: No /kernel >>FreeBSD/i386 BOOT Default: 0:ad(0,a)/kernel boot: Some of the suggestions to previous questions of this type suggested that the problem might have something to do with the 1024 cylinder limit. But from my reading of the latest release notes, this is no longer an issue. I've tried entering the boot commands by hand at this prompt but still no boot. And I've booted off of the live filesystem disk and I can see that there is a "/boot" directory and that "/boot/loader" as well as "/kernel" does exist. Here's the other thing I've seen in some of these similar messages: installation of Linux (mostly Red Hat), happens without a problem. I have two identical machines, one currently running Red Hat Linux 6.2 and on the other one I'm attempting to install FreeBSD. Any thoughts/suggestions/recommendations? Even though the release notes say the 1024 cylinder limit is no longer a problem, I've tried doing the install with a / of as little as 50MB and still the same problem. Here are some details of the computer I'm working on: The machine is a 650MHz Pentium III, with 256MB of RAM one 3COM PCI 3C905C-TX and the following disk configuration: Primary master: IBM DPTA-373420 Primary slave: IBM DPTA-373420 Secondary master: IBM DPTA-373420 Secondary slave: Toshiba CD-ROM The IBM drives have a capacity of 32864MB. In the BIOS, I've tried setting the mode on the disks to: Auto, LBA and LARGE. In addition, when using FDISK in the install, I set each disk to dangerously dedicated. The operating system is installed on the primary master. I've also played around with the size of the root partition, initially setting it to 5GB but now going down to 2GB. After each install, we get the same error mentioned above. Oscar To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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