From owner-freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jan 5 13:03:11 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3D0FE16A4CE for ; Wed, 5 Jan 2005 13:03:11 +0000 (GMT) Received: from viefep15-int.chello.at (viefep15-int.chello.at [213.46.255.19]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C69E443D31 for ; Wed, 5 Jan 2005 13:03:09 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from sebastian.posch@chello.at) Received: from [80.109.241.91] by viefep15-int.chello.at (InterMail vM.6.01.03.04 201-2131-111-106-20040729) with ESMTP id <20050105130308.XZZX2397.viefep15-int.chello.at@[80.109.241.91]> for ; Wed, 5 Jan 2005 14:03:08 +0100 Message-ID: <41DBE60E.2080201@chello.at> Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2005 14:05:18 +0100 From: Sebastian Posch User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041217 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: install 4.9 on a Gericom laptop X-BeenThere: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Mobile computing with FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2005 13:03:11 -0000 Hello! I'm trying to install FreeBSD 4.9 on an old laptop. it is a Gericom Pentium 100Mhz, 24MB RAM, 560MB hard disk, unable to boot from CD. btw I'd update the BIOS but it looks like i won't find an update to this old system ("SystemSoft SCU BIOS"). there was Windows95 installed, HD/CD-ROM etc. worked fine. after booting with floppy and setting mount points and running the sysinstall and all that, I get a "unable to swap to dev/ad0s1b" and then "unable to mount root filesystem". before rebooting I try Alt+F2 and I get the following: ad0: hard error writing fsbn 74 (ad0 bn 74; cn 0 tn 1 sn 11) status 51 error=04 ad0: cannot find label (no disk label) ad0s1: cannot find label (no disk label) DEBUG: Scanning disk ad0 for root filesystem DEBUG: Found rootdev at ad0s1a! DEBUG: Found vardev at ad0s1e! DEBUG: Found tmpdev at ad0s1f! DEBUG: Found usrdev at ad0s1g! DEBUG: Scanning disk ad0 for swap partitions DEBUG: Found swapdev at ad0s1b! ad0: cannot find label (no disk label) ad0s1: cannot find label (no disk label) ... newfs: /dev/ad0s1a: Invalid argument DEBUG: Command 'newfs -b 16384 -f 2048 /dev/ad0s1a' returns status of 1 - I tried different params to newfs (such as half or double the value) to no avail. I also tried several different partitioning than the automatic settings. Google told me to try booting with "hw.pcic.intr_path=1, hw.pcic.irq=0, hw.ata.atapi_dma=0" but that didn't change a thing either. I even tried to install Debian 3.0 but it seems it also doesn't like that hard disk. Does anybody have a recommendation?