Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 11:43:36 -0400 From: Dave Blizzard <blizzard@canoe.ca> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: blizzard@canoe.ca Subject: FreeBSD.NOT Message-ID: <31B30828.70F8@canoe.ca>
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Ok I have to admit defeat. For three weeks I have tried every permutation of installing Free BSD on a 386 and 486 pc so that it installs on a SCSI drive purchased especially for the install. The problem is that I have an IDE drive as drive C and the SCSI as drive D. DOS sees everything fine and I have no hardware conflicts. What were the problems? 1) BSD's Fdisk cannot see the correct geometry for the SCSI drive. Even though I plug in the right numbers for the drive, BSD adds the size of the IDE drive to the SCSI drive and then destroys the partition table of both drives. Even when I dedicate the entire SCSI drive to FreeBSD, The install destroys the IDE partition and Boot sectors. 2) The installer destroys the partition table of the IDE drive even if the install is aborted. I assume that that last little syncing drives 1...2... is what does it before the install quits. 3) Even though the install seems to go without errors, the bootmgr uses virus technology (sic) to install itself in track 0 sector 1. This cannot be removed by using fdisk /mbr as it also seems that the track is write protected. Even diskedit cannot zero out the sector. This has cause several screaming fits around here as the only low level format I have is in the bios of my old 386 board so I then have to reinstall it to retrieve the drive. SOMEONE WHOULD WARN USERS OF THIS. THE RECOVERY PROCEDURE IS AS FOLLOWS: low level format the drive install DOS from the original setup. The usual procedures (format & fdisk etc) do not work I suspect because they use BIOS routines while the original DOS install writes directly to the disk 4 Even if I put a small BSD partition on the IDE drive for root and swap, the BSD fdisk still screws up the SCSI partitions (thinks the drive is much larger than reality) and then destroys the IDE drive. 5 The FIPS program has a serious bug in it as it creates a second primary dos partition which confuses the hell out of DOS Short of dedicating a complete machine to BSD, is there any way to install BSD on a SCSI drive D when an IDE drive is already installed. How can one deinstall the stupid Bootmgr??? The last response to this question was some words about patching INT13 but had no real mechanism or software to do this. Sorry if this sounds like I am venting here but something is seriously wrong with the docs or I just don't understand this OS.
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