Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 10:02:55 +0000 From: "Brian Candler" <B.Candler@dial.pipex.com> To: "Gary Palmer" <gpalmer@freebsd.org>, "Nate Williams" <nate@sri.MT.net> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD boot problem Message-ID: <199606060920.KAA01711@typhoon.dial.pipex.net>
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[From: "Gary Palmer" <gpalmer@FreeBSD.ORG>] > Wild guess; You have a Promise 2300 EIDE controller? There are known > problems with this controller Yes!! It reports the following at bootup: PROMISE EIDE2300 external BIOS V2.4 Then asks me if I want [T]urbo, [F]ast or [N]ormal. I usually pick [T]urbo, but I just tried [N]ormal and FreeBSD still doesn't boot. Unfortunately the system was bought second-hand and I don't have a manual nor utilities disk for the controller, so don't know how to go about disabling its BIOS. If anyone has got FreeBSD to work with this card, please let me know how. In the mean time, is it possible for me to boot a kernel from floppy (e.g. the install disk) but have it use wd0s1a as the root partition? I notice there's a "-r" flag to boot, but I can't get it to do anything useful. [From: Nate Williams <nate@sri.MT.net>] >> The disk drive is a Western Digital WDAC31200, for which the BIOS setup is >> normally 2484 cylinders/16 heads/63 sectors per track. fdisk reports >> 621/64/63 instead, which I suspect is an EIDE artifact. Besides, Win95 >> boots happily, so I presume the partition table is OK. > >Not necessarily. You need to tell the FreeBSD install to use the values >2484/16/63 I just tried changing it, using fdisk on the fixit disk. It first warns that "Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1". I then get it to recalculate the geometries for both partitions, but it stores the wrong values for the Win95 partition, even when I enter the right ones manually: beg: cyl 444 (should be 1468) end: cyl 435 (should be 2483) It appears that the values are being truncated to 10 bits. Once I made this change, Win95 no longer booted. So I changed it back, on the grounds that one working OS is better than none :-) Thanks both for your help! Brian.
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