Date: Thu, 23 Feb 95 14:12:57 EST From: jeffa@sybase.com (Jeff Anuszczyk) To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Cc: jeffa@sybase.com Subject: Assistance installing FreeBSD V2.0R Message-ID: <9502231912.AA18584@cottonwood.sybgate.sybase.com>
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Hi All, Sorry for two questions in one day... but I'm trying to recover my personal machine and I'm having a bit of a problem. Basically, I've been a happy V1.1.5.1 user for quite some time when, all of a sudden, the partition table on my machine decide to get corrupted. Ugh. As an aside, everyone should seriously consider getting a PD program off the net that can do a backup of this. Losing your partition table means you loose the entire contents of the disk. Unless you can restore it... everything is gone. In any case, I've been unable to get either V1.1R or 2.0R installed again to the SCSI disk. In either case the system usually panics while copying data to one of the partitions (usually /usr). The panic is 'duplicate Inode'. Most frustrating... especially since I haven't changed the configuration of this machine at all from the last time it worked prior to the loss of the partition table. So, what have I checked? 1) Memory... I did a full comprehensive test of all system memory It all checked out just fine (took about 4 hours to test 16MB using 10 passes of the checker). 2) Disk..... I did a low level SCSI format, then SCSI verify, then scandisk, then linear read/butterfly read/random read. Everything came out okay. 3) System... passed all diagnostics from a 3rd party package. 4) Virus.... the restore DOS stuff passed McCafee clean So, what have I done? 1) Rewrote the MBR using FDISK/MBR 2) Re Fdisk'ed the whole thing to have 1 Primary dos, 1 Extended and 1 FreeBSD (total 1GB) 3) Reloaded V1.1R from CD-ROM (would have then tried to upgrade to 1.1.5.1 via the patches). No go... panics trying to load to the /usr partition (usually... I've done it a number of times and it did fail once in the root partition). 4) Tried to load V2.0R from CD-ROM... same sort of problem as V1.1R. Note that I used the latest Floppy images from freefall.cdrom.com generated by Jordan... the images on the CD-ROM wouldn't work for me. What is the configuration? Intel 486DX2/66, Generic VLB Motherboard w/ AMI, 16MB, 256KB cache Adaptec 1542B (using for floppy controller too) DEC DSP3107LS SCSI-II (1.05GB) NEC CDR-84 SCSI-I CD-ROM Western Digital IDE (212MB) ATI Mach-8 SMC Elite Ultra-C Combo card for 2 Serial, 1 Parallel, IDE Colorado Jumbo-250 Again, this machine was working just fine until the partition table went away. Why did that happen? Don't know... can't tell... assumed I had a virus or something but checking of my restored DOS backup tape contents didn't show any viruses. I, unfortunately, can't restore the tape backups of FreeBSD. None of the tapes that I made (and I did do regular backups) seem to be readable. I even went and got a new Jumbo-250 to see if there was something wrong with mine. No go... the tapes just report a bunch of ECC memory errors from the ft program. This causes dump to bauk with a checksum error. Oh yea, I was able to restore a virgin 1.1R system to the IDE drive. Other than this use I've actually had the IDE disk disabled in the BIOS (I even unplugged it!). This makes it even more of a question and seems to point the finger at the HD/Adaptec controller. Boy am I stumped on this one. General questions: 1) Would modifying the speed of the Adaptec controller to 5.0MB instead of the default 5.7MB achieve anything? I seem to remember someone talking about this once upon a time. 2) Would trying to install on the disk WITHOUT dos being installed help debug this (I need to restore my DOS partition though... since I use some stuff on that side of the world). 3) Would playing around with some BIOS stuff like memory wait states, etc help. Perhaps slowing things down a tad would point out some timing problems. Any thoughts, suggestions, etc would be greately appreciated. If I'm going to loose my V1.1.5.1 system I'd just as soon upgrade to V2.0R. Any ideas as to how to get that installed would also be really appreciated. In all honesty I've seriously thought of replacing the motherboard with one of the ASUS boards (containing the NCR SCSI) that everyone is speaking so highly about. Any thoughts, suggestions, etc about that? How much does a bare one (I've got the CPU and 72-pin SIMMS already) go for and what model number is it. Oh boy... a very frustrated computer user! Sorry about the length of this but I've been going crazy trying to get this working. Time to change professions... anyone need a burger flipper :-) Thanks for any help! - Jeff
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