Date: Tue, 04 Aug 1998 17:23:10 -0700 From: Steve Roskowski <rosko@mpath.com> To: Benedikt Stockebrand <benedikt@devnull.ruhr.de> Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: install friendly? Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19980804172310.01567cd0@mail.mpath.com> In-Reply-To: <87ww8pc61s.fsf@devnull.ruhr.de> References: <Steve Roskowski's message of "Mon, 03 Aug 1998 11:54:54 -0700"> <3.0.5.32.19980803115454.0155c100@mail.mpath.com>
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> >> 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. > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > >Do you have any reason for this setup? AFAIK it isn't *meant* to work >this way. > >Unless you have really good reason to set things up like that you >should consider making the ZIP drive master, or swapping ZIP drive and >CDROM and making the CDROM master. > >If you really need it set up like this you may want to consider >building a custom kernel. the docs with the motherboard specifically suggest for configs with IDE HD, CDROM and OTHER that the OTHER be second device on the second bus. I will move it & see. Not being an IDE wiz, it was unclear whether the term master and slave refered to ownership of the bus or to initiate/response relationship (as in bus master/bus slave on PCI...), so I went with the recommendation. > >> - 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. >> 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. > >I'm not particularly into IDE devices but this *should* work provided >you've got a decent MBR/primary boot loader. > >Anyway, if you can't help it a boot floppy could help at least to get >things started. That's not exactly a long-term solution, though. > >> 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. > >Well, as far as your IDE setup is concerned, that's not exactly >something that belongs into the FreeBSD docs. > >I don't know about booting off the second disk, but that sounds like a >problem with your boot manager rather than FreeBSD, too. BTW, which >boot manager do you use? > The frustration with the whole install stuff was I thought I followed directions, and did exactly what the novice install procedure suggested. Working with the 2.2.7 CD from Walnut Creek, built a floppy and went for it. step 1) partitioned the scsi drive to MBR (no boot loader) and the standard 3 FreeBSD partitions via the (A) command (use all the disk). step 2) went to the IDE drive and tried to put the bootloader on it. This was pretty confusing, since the only way to touch it was to say I wanted to partition it then quit, but when it asked I said yes, put a bootloader on it. step 3) did the rest of the install (all from 2.2.7 CDROM) step 4) reboot the system step 5) pops up to the boot loader, I say BSD step 6) BSD starts initial stuff, I get a boot prompt and let it timeout step 7) BSD panic stops, can't find root, reboot step 8) system reboots, never gets beyond the bios, no valid HDD step 9) put the BSD boot floppy back in & reboot (stupidly I did not have a Win95 boot disk lying around) step 10) look @ disk configuration (via config/fdisk option) and IDE drive looks like it has been converted into 3 partition, MBR, FreeBSD (big), unknown (small) at the top (this is from memory, so the names may be off). step 11) try to boot directly to SCSI (by changing bios option), again panics step 12-step N-1.. many attempt to reconfigure stuff, all fail step N) give up and hand it to our corporate technician who has done lots of NT and Linux install for dual boots. after reinstalling Win95, he completely independently (all I said was I couldn't get it to work, here is what I want, here are the CDs) had the exact same problems MANY times. In the end, we partitioned the IDE drive, put the root partition there & it all works ok. after a few other communications with people on the list, it now appears that the mistake was allowing the boot: prompt on reboot to timeout to the default, and I needed to enter something else there and then go screw with a boot.config file someplace. Ok, but hardly intuitive, and the boot prompt goes by really fast on this machine (like 10 seconds at most on 350 Mhz Pentium II), NOT enough time to read & grok the long list of instructions about how to make it boot to some other drive. naively, I expected the novice install to correctly configure the boot model to match what I had installed through the install tools. thx for the help steve To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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