Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 16:26:07 -0700 (MST) From: Charlie Sorsby <crs@swcp.com> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: I'm confused... Message-ID: <200412112326.QAA01128@quail.sorsby.org>
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Is the installer for freeBSD 4.5 broken?
I've long procrastinated updating to a more recent version of
freeBSD, mainly because I hate trying to get things back the way I
had them afterwards.
Consequently, I've been running 3.4 for quite a long while. Today,
I finally decided to bite the bullet and update to 4.5, the most
recent CD that I have.
Actually, "update" is the wrong word, I suppose. What I had
planned to do is simply to install it on another disk that I have
in my system.
First a summary of my system (I'll append details at the end) even
though this is a system that has been running freeBSD for years.
I'm running an Intel D845WN m'board with 2.4GHz Pentium 4 and 512MB
of RAM. I have two SCSI cards, my original Adaptec 2940 and a
TekRam DC390U2W (I think that's right).
On the 2940 I have my CDROM drive and the three disk drives; a
fourth drive is on the TekRam. My plan was to install 4.5 on that
fourth drive. Why? See next paragraph.
In the past, when I've gone to a newer version, what I've done is
to keep the older version on one disk and install the newer on
another. That way I could boot to either until I got the new
system the way I wanted it.
Consequently, on the first of the four disks (da0s2), a 2GB IBM,
is leftovers from freeBSD 2.1.5 as well as a defunct W95 slice
(da0s1). On the second, a 4GB Seagate, is freeBSD 3.4. The third
disk a 9GB Seagate is /home and nothing else.
The fourth disk, an 18GB Seagate, was slated for a recent version
of freeBSD. I'd planned to install 4.5 on that disk so that I
could also continue to boot to 3.4 until I have 4.5 set up to my
satisfaction.
I've seen nothing that says that freeBSD can't handle more than a
couple of disk drives nor that the installer cannot. But that is
my experience today. I should have gone quail hunting as I'd
originally planned. :(
Here's what happened:
In the past I've never had a problem booting from the CDROMs but
the Intel m'board is a replacement for a previous board that died.
The first misadventure was that I couldn't get it to boot from the
CDROM although the (SCSI BIOS, I think) boot messages recognize
that a bootable CDROM was in the drive. I should have known there
that it was going to be one of those days...
Giving up on that, I dd'ed the floppy images to a couple of
floppies and booted from them.
The real problem occurred when I got to the "FreeBSD Disklabel
Editor" screen. To get there, I'd gone through the fdisk stuff
with all four disks. With the first three, simply going into the
fdisk screen and immediately entering "q" and then accepting the
"install boot manager" option for it. With the fourth disk, I
created a maximum freeBSD slice leaving room for the boot manager.
Fine so far.
On to the disklabel screen:
There I found that all four disks were listed at the top of the
screen and the information about them seemed to be correct.
In the middle of the screen was a list of (Unix) partitions for da0
and da1.
Thinking that, as I progressed through them either I could select
the other two disk from the top or, as I worked through to the end
of those visibly listed, I proceeded to provide mount points for
the existing disks. When I had done for the last partition in the
list, it didn't proceed to another partition; it jumped back to the
first of those I'd already gone through.
Going to the top of the page didn't do any good either.
Highlighting the line for da2 and hitting <ENTER> simply took me to
the line for da3 and hitting <ENTER> there took me back to the
first partition in the list that I'd already provided mount points
for. Nothing I could think to try allowed me to provide a mount
point for /home (all of da2) nor to create partitions for da3 (on
to which I wanted to install 4.5).
Using F1 for help was singularly unhelpful. It was more concerned
with explaining Unix partitions to microsoft users than explaining
how to get the bloody installer to allow me define mount points for
existing partitions and to create new partitions on the disk onto
which I wanted to install 4.5.
Clearly, I could have missed something but I'm at a loss. Can I
not set up four disks with various versions of freeBSD and /home on
them and get all the partitions available from the new installation
on the fourth disk?
In retrospect, I'm wondering if I should have not tried to put the
boot manager on da2 (/home) since it isn't bootable anyways. Could
that have been the problem? Wouldn't the disklable editor have
simply allowed me to skip to da3? I guess I could have selected
it (so that I could define a mount point for it) but chosen *not*
to put a boot manager on it. Surely the disklabel editor is smart
enough not to be confused by something like that -- after all, the
fstab that it will produce will have other disks and partitions to
mount that are not what will be running when that fstab is being
used anyways.
Please tell me what I'm doing wrong.
Kindest regards,
Charlie
--
Charlie Sorsby
crs@swcp.com
P. O. Box 1225
Edgewood, NM 87015
USA
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