Date: Mon, 03 Aug 1998 12:34:10 -0700 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Steve Roskowski <rosko@mpath.com> Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: install friendly? Message-ID: <199808031934.MAA00607@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 03 Aug 1998 11:54:54 PDT." <3.0.5.32.19980803115454.0155c100@mail.mpath.com>
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> two problems > > first - as a "new" user of FreeBSD, the install procedure drove me > absolutely nuts. After 8 hours, I handed it over to a professional. 2 > days, 8 reinstalls of Windows98 & FreeBSD and now it works. More on this > later if it matters. Depends on whether these are pilot-error mistakes or genuine problems. > Second - the system does not recogonize my IDE ZIP drive. It is the slave > on the second built in IDE controller, with the first controller supporting > an HD and CDROM. The master slot on the second IDE bus is vacant. This is an illegal configuration. It's sufficiently common that we try to work around it, but we don't handle the Zip well in this case. You should never have a slave without a master (that's got to be obvious, surely). > - on the install, some details > system has an IDE HD on the built in controller and an Adapted PCI card > with a 4 gig drive. The target configuration was Win95 on the IDE and > FreeBSD on SCSI. Apparently after many many attempts this is not possible. Yes, and relatively straightforward too. Lots of people do this all the time. > Although all of the tools blindly let you proceed, when FreeBSD tries to > boot it panics, unable to find root, and promptly writes a boot record into > the bottom of the Win95 drive, corrupting it. The entire system is then > dead, forcing a complete reinstall. FreeBSD does no such thing. You may have other software intalled, or a virus, or a faulty boot manager, but FreeBSD will not write to disks that it hasn't mounted. > The system now works with a small root partition on the IDE drive for > FreeBSD along with Win95, and the usr partition on SCSI. Acceptable, but I > sure wish the docs or the tools would have saved me 3 days. The correct process is to install to the SCSI drive, then boot with 1:sd(0,a)freebsd as documented on the help screen shown by the bootstrap. You can put this string in /boot.config in order to simplify things. -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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