From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Nov 28 12:18:33 1995 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id MAA01659 for questions-outgoing; Tue, 28 Nov 1995 12:18:33 -0800 Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id MAA01650 for ; Tue, 28 Nov 1995 12:18:21 -0800 Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id NAA21932; Tue, 28 Nov 1995 13:13:24 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199511282013.NAA21932@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: Panic: Cannot mount ROOT To: davidg@root.com Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 13:13:23 -0700 (MST) Cc: cpallone@nancy.compusa.com, questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199511272109.NAA00158@corbin.Root.COM> from "David Greenman" at Nov 27, 95 01:09:33 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1125 Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk > The "cannot mount root" panic usually happens when the system can't find > your disk control and/or drive with '/' on it. What kind of SCSI disk > controller are you using, and did FreeBSD find it at startup? Personally, I only see it when the C/H/S value in the partition table, when multiplied by an incorrect geometry, doesn't give the correct absolute sector for the partition start. This used to happen when the BIOS geometry translation was incorrect. Now it happens when the BIOS geometry is forced to the Adaptec "standard" translation on older hardware, on non-linear BIOS_based trnslation (like WD1007 sector sparing), and so on. I'm not quire sure about the code with regard to a "boot-from-floppy, install onto an OnTrack 6.x using EIDE disk"; I don't own any IDE disks because I like my machines to work without hassles. But from the logic, I suspect that an installation of a boot manager at install time from a floppy install might toast things nicely as well. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.