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Date:      Tue, 19 Sep 1995 16:07:20 +0600
From:      tyork@vt.edu (Thayer York)
To:        ejon@ll.mit.edu (Eric `two cats' Jones)
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Boot manager problems
Message-ID:  <199509192008.NAA27442@freefall.freebsd.org>

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At 09:53 AM 9/19/95 -0400, Eric `two cats' Jones wrote:
[original question removed]

>> BTW - my configuration is as follows:
>> Gateway 2000 486-33V (VLB)
>> 16 MB memory
>> EIDE compatible BIOS
>> 3-1/2" floppy
>> 1 GB WD IDE hard drive (none of which is being used for FBSD)
>> 340 MB WD IDE hard drive (60 MB partioned to FBSD and mounted as "/")
>> 210 MB WD IDE hard drive (16 MB for FBSD swap partition, rest as a FBSD
>[snip]
>> IDE CD-ROM drive
>> ATI Graphics Ultra Pro VLB w/1MB VRAM
>
>Which is very similar to a system that I'm struggling with.
>	I had a system with two IDE HD's on the primary controller
>and an ATAPI CD-ROM on the secondary.  This worked fine, except that
>wdc1 was not being found at probe-time so the ATAPI patches to 2.0.5
>weren't doing me any good.  To make a long story short, I decided the
>easiest way to get my CD-ROM going was to add a cheap HD to the 2nd
>controller.  
>	Here's the creepy part: BootEasy now did not print the
>line indicating that F5 selects the 2nd disk for booting.  But it did.
>That's the good news.  The bad news is that when FreeBSD tries to load,
>the machine locks up after the bar turns a few times.  I'd be 
>interested to hear if it does the same for you, Thayer.

Well now, that was fun.  Did a reboot and when the BootEasy menu came up I
chose F5 (which was not on the list, as you said).  I then heard rather
unpleasant clicking sounds come from what I assume was the second hard disk.
Then I got a message saying there was an error with the operating system and
the system froze.  Only option then was to reboot and choose F1.  Let me
point out (which wasn't really clear before) that the root FBSD partition is
located on the second hard disk while the main /usr partition in located on
the third one (that resides on the secondary IDE controller - integrated
into the motherboard on my system).

>	Sorry, no solutions.  Just more questions.

Since I'm new to FreeBSD and the distribution I got was relatively free of
such hinderances as documentation (I got it on a CD put together at the CS
dept. at my school, Virginia Tech) let me ask a pretty basic question.  If I
can't get BootEasy to work, is it possible to set up the system to boot from
a floppy and then somehow switch to using the the installation of FBSD that
resides on the hard drive (so I don't have to keep that floppy in the entire
time I'm using the system)?

 -> Thayer




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