Date: Tue, 03 Jan 1995 17:57:14 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: lets@risc.austin.ibm.com (Richard Letsinger) Cc: questions@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Org), lets@lets.austin.ibm.com Subject: Re: FreeBSD Installation Difficulties Message-ID: <13389.789184634@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 03 Jan 95 19:33:20." <9501040133.AA42263@risc.austin.ibm.com>
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> My first concern after reading the installation guide, release note, etc. > was that I was not going to be able to install FreeBSD from the Walnut Creek > CD because my CD drive is probably not supported by FreeBSD. Obviously I > could get started, because the top level of the CD is DOS format, but it You can copy the bindist directory to your C: drive (copy it whole, directory and all contents) and select `DOS' installation when asked. This will work fine, as long as you're using your C drive. > - Assuming that my CD drive is not Mitsumi (and not SCSI), is it hopeless to > try to install FreeBSD from the Walnut Creek CD? If so, can the files on > the CD be copied to my empty DOS E: drive and install from E:? Other > alternatives? Not hopeless at all - see above. > - Why didn't my disk 1 153MB DOS slice show up at h with "MSDOS"? Only primary DOS partitions are currently seen. > - If I keep my DOS partition on disk 1 as an extended DOS partition, will I > be able to mount it under FreeBSD? If so, how? You'll need to edit your disklabel and try to bump the starting location forward by secs/track number of blocks. This is kludge, but for now we don't have native support for DOS extended partitions, sorry! > The hard disk reboot went well at first. My first prompt, from the boot > manager was: > > F2 ... dos > F3 ... OS2 > F5 ... disk 2 > > Default: F? > > - Why does the boot manager call it disk 2 when unix calls it disk 1 (wd1)? F5 *leads* you to disk2. You're currently looking at disk1. If you hit F5, you'll see a boot menu item for disk1 leading back. > FreeBSD began to come up. It checked a slew of devices. I recognized my > parallel port and my 2 hard disks and the data displayed for them seemed > correct to me. Then the boot stopped with: > > panic: cannot mount root The doc is wrong. You'll have to type: wd(1,a)/kernel I need to change this, sorry. > I'd also like to ask a few things about the boot manager. > > - Did I do any damage when I accidently did a Write MBR in FreeBSD Fdisk on > disk 0? Was anything written anywhere by this? Maybe I was supposed to > do a Write MBR on disk 0? I don't think so. > The FreeBSD boot manager didn't go in the same place as the OS/2 boot > manager I already had installed. I say this because if I press F3 (the OS/2 This is correct. The boot manager is on disk0. OS/2's boot manager is on its OWN partition. It's done sort of different than most boot managers. > My guess on this is that there is a boot record (my term) at the beginning > of (one or each) disk that sends the boot to code in a disk partition and > that the FreeBSD boot manager is in the FreeBSD slice. Then the FreeBSD > boot manager is able to branch to any other partition on any disk and it > happens that the OS/2 boot manager is in it's own partition on disk 0. You need to read the Tutorial.. :-) It talks about all of this. > - Last, I saw in questions that someone said the FreeBSD boot manager can be > manipulated with DOS FDISK using the /MBR option, but it wasn't clear to > me what FDISK /MBR did. I'll read the DOS manual when I get home tonight, > but can you tell me in case the manual is not clear with regard to non-DOS > setups like mine? It reinitializes the MBR, nuking any boot manager resident there.. Jordan
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