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Date:      Sun, 4 Jun 1995 00:06:31 -0400 (EDT)
From:      jan@bagend.atl.ga.us (Jan Isley)
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Hackers)
Subject:   adventures in alpha install
Message-ID:  <m0sI6xL-0006QUC@bagend.atl.ga.us>

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Adventures in the latest (last time I looked :-) boot.flp on 3 June
on a 1033mb drive that has OS/2 Boot Manager, 320mb dos, 128mb OS/2.
This leaves ~50mb below 1024 cylinders. (of 2099 cyl on the disk)

OS/2 boot manager requires that a partition be totally within the
1024 cyl limit to add it to the boot menu.  No problem, I will just
boot from a floppy anyway.  When instructed to not diddle with the
MBR, the install crashes with "Fatal Error ... Invalid Variable ...
something ..."  I can duplicate this if need be, and record it
exactly ... just have to find a pencil my dogs have not chewed up. :)
All setup variations which includes NOT updating the MBR results in
said fatal error and a reboot.

I want to continue to use OS/2 BM, so I tell it to write the MBR
and proceed to install from a dos partition.  All goes well until
reboot time when I get an error message something to the effect of
partition out of range... again, if they are that interesting, I can
duplicate this and write down the exact message.  Anyway, besides
not booting anything at all now, I have to boot dos from a floppy
to make OS/2 BM bootable again.

Then I recall the slice scheme being discussed a while back and my
wishfull thinking tells me to try creating two slices on the disk,
one below 1024 cyl for / and another for the rest of the disk.
Partition will gladly create another partition for me ...  and
Disk Label will gladly let me divide it up, but as you know and I
learned, the second slice gets called /dev/X which is not kosher,
cannot be newfs'd or mounted and the install ground to a halt. 
However, if I escape out of the error message, I am told that
installation was successful. :)

btw, freefall would NOT let me do a get somedir.tar.  wcarchive
would let me get one-dir.tar but all subsequent get dir.tar
commands would fail... log out, log in and get another dir.tar
worked, however.

btw2, did dict change?  Install failed to extract dict from a
few days ago.  If I then x'd out dict and tried to only install
say, manpages, after dict failed, the procedure remembered that
something had failed and would not attempt any further installs.

Has anyone tested floppy installs?  If not, I can give it a try.
-- 
Jan Isley
jan@bagend.atl.ga.us



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