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Date:      Sun, 12 Jan 2003 23:19:35 +0000
From:      "Steve Gladstone" <steve_gladstone@hotmail.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Newbie needs help with installation tasks.
Message-ID:  <F40V54Ogddu5qE8DzHx00005f65@hotmail.com>

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I am trying to install FreeBSD 4.7R on an Intel Celeron 300MHz PC which has 
a 4GB hard drive and Windows 98 installed.

I have used Partition Magic to shrink the Windows partition on my hard drive 
from 4GB to 3GB and created a 1GB partition for the FreeBSD installation.
Partition Magic didn't offer support for preparing a partition for FreeBSD 
installation so I elected to create a FAT32 partition reasoning that the 
FreeBSD installation process would reformat the partition for the required 
file system.

I downloaded 4.7-mini.iso from FreeBSD.org and used Nero/Express to burn the 
file system to a CD-R disk.
I viewed the CD-R disk with a utility called ISOBUSTER and it appeared to be 
a bootable CDROM.

I marked my 1GB partition as active and rebooted my PC, after selecting 
CDROM as the first device in my BIOS settings.
I got an error message 'Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM ; Failure...' Invalid system 
disk

I searched the available docs on the Internet and concluded that I would 
have to boot from floppies as my PC would not allow booting from the CDROM 
device, despite the BIOS settings.

I formatted two floppy disks and used the /tools/fdimage utility on the CD-R 
disk to copy /floppies/kern.flp and /floppies/mfsroot.flp to the floppy 
disks.

I rebooted again with the new partition marked as active after selecting the 
floppy drive as the first boot device in the BIOS settings.

I got the FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader message as expected but instead of 
being prompted to insert the mfsroot disk I got the following messages...

/kernel text=0x2833b1 zf_read: unexpected EOF
zf_read: unexpected EOF

elf_loadexec: archsw.readin failed.
can't load module '/kernel'; input/output error.

The boot process then indicated that it was...
Booting [kernel]

and promptly produced the same error messages as before indicating that it 
could not load 'kernel' or 'kernel.old'

Until two days ago I didn't have any prior experience with CD-R burning, 
using Partition Magic, or installation of a UNIX operating system so I am 
quite prepared to believe I have made mistakes in the pre-installation 
tasks.
However, after searching the Internet for descriptions of similar problems I 
am unsure how to proceed.

I would appreciate any advice on why I couldn't install from the CD-R DISK 
and/or why I can't boot from the floppies.












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