Date: Tue, 01 Jun 1999 09:20:40 +0100 From: Dominique Jacquel <d.jacquel@ed.ac.uk> To: Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: 3.2 kernel panic: unable to mount root! + new question Message-ID: <375397D8.6FD03DDB@ed.ac.uk> References: <Pine.BSF.4.03.9905312253130.4498-100000@resnet.uoregon.edu>
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Doug White wrote: > > Are you sure that the disk is found? Check the boot messages and make > sure your SCSI controller is probed correctly. > > > Are there variable I could define at the prompt to try to kickstart the > > system? > hi, I worked it out! Well half of it anyway! I found the bit in the FAQ that explain how IDE+SCSI setups can get the BIOS and freeBSD confused on which disk is which. But I think there's something important that is NOT in the FAQ. The same problem can occur if you have more than one SCSI channel. This is why my install didn't work: My motherboard has an adaptec aic7895 dual channel controller onboard. Channel A (bus0) is a wide/narrow SCSI. Channel B (bus1) is a wide only SCSI. I've got an IBM narrow SCSI disk on channel A (+ a CD + a CDR + a zip). I also have a Wide SCSI disk on B. Since B is much faster, I use it to put OSes and Apps. I already have NT installed on B. And to allow NT to Boot, my SCSI controller is set to scan B first. As a result, when installing freeBSD, floppy is disk0, the disk on B comes up as disk1 while the disk on A is disk2. So the install takes place on what is known as disk1. But on first reboot, freeBSD reorders the drives in their logical order. That is to say disk on A is disk1 and disk on B is disk2. Obviously, this creates a mess of things and the kernel cannot find / on disk1 since it became disk2! :-o Anyway, I finally figured this out and reinstalled freeBSD with the SCSI busses scanned in the right order (A first, B second). The install rightly created the right devices and installed everything on disk2. So that me sorted, sort of. Thank for taking the time to reply. Not all is solved though. Because to be able to dual boot BSD+NT, I still need to scan B first. NT is fine with that but freeBSD is still having problems. I have to define root_disk_unit="2" and rootdev="disk2s3a" at the prompt to make it find /. Where can I put these two definitions to make them permanent? dom. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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