Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2002 00:05:07 -0500 From: David Eoll <deoll@mediaone.net> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: 3.5.1 install frozen at "Copying initial device drivers" Message-ID: <3C54DC03.1723EDED@mediaone.net>
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I'm trying to install FreeBSD on an 486 which I inherited. It has a 240MB Quantum HD, 8MB RAM, 3Com 3C509 ISA NIC. The previous owner actually had Win95 installed on it! Suprisingly, it actually ran, but very slowly, as would be expected. I'm sure every mouse click was generating a torrent of page faults. The hard drive chattered away pretty much non-stop no matter what you did. Anyway, the point is that it still worked, but I was eager to get Win95 off that poor system's back and put something more reasonable on it. I booted into windows before doing the BSD install just to verify the general health of the hardware and gather info about IRQs, etc. Moved some files back and forth between floppy and HD. Did some network stuff, telnet, ftp, etc. Everything fine. The first thing I discover is that I have to install FreeBSD 3.5.1 to get support for my NIC. Anyway, the install hangs at the point where the device special files are being created on the new filesystem. Looking at the debug output, I see that newfs returned without error (although there is a warning about unallocated sectors at the end of the last cylinder, maybe I'll try reducing the block size for the newfs, it used the default of 8192). Next I see that the new filesystem is mounted at /mnt, and mkdir /mnt/dev is attempted. Then there is a message saying "MakeDev: Unknown major/minor for devtype -". Then a command 'find -x /dev | cpio -v -pdum /mnt' which looks like it should copy all device files from mfsroot to the new filesystem on the HD. And there it sits. I've tried several times, with same result. If I retry and choose not to recreate root file system, it FTPs the first binary from ftp.freebsd.org, and hangs trying to write the first chunk to disk. Which makes sense because my /dev is hosed, right? So anyway, I'm going to keep playing with it. I'll see if I can't lay my hands on another slightly larger HD and maybe another couple of SIMMs, although I don't think that's the problem. After all, if a bloated "OS" like Win95 can run on it, shouldn't FreeBSD? After a quick google, I notice an IRC log where someone was having a problem hanging during the same part of a freebsd install to a 486. There was no solution offered though. Could this be a known problem with 3.5.1 and 486en? I don't see anything in the mailng list archive from the appropriate time period. Regards, David Eoll To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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