Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 10 Feb 1997 23:32:36 -0500
From:      lynn@ruraltel.net (Jonathan Hogg)
To:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Booting from 3rd harddrive
Message-ID:  <32FFF664.28B2@ruraltel.net>

next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Dear BSDers,

I recently installed FreeBSD as an X86 installation to a Western Digital
1.2GB WDAC31200 harddrive.  The drive is my "third" drive, and is the
second drive on the secondary EIDE controller of a very recent AWARD
BIOS controlled motherboard. (AWARD v 4.51, I think).

I installed BSD from the Walnut Creek 2.1.5 CD-ROM, and I got no errors
during installation.

When I finished and tried a reboot, BSD seemed to be doing fine down to
the last second, and then it "paniced" trying to manage something toward
the end of the boot sequence, saying it was unable to mount the root on
wd2a.  Well, wd2a is the first (only) slice on my third drive, all
right.

I then tried to run config on the next boot attempt.  No problem running
it.  I excluded all devices I don't have under the Storage heading and
tried to reboot.  Same thing.

Here's one catch, though.  During install I told BSD not to install any
MBR boot manager, since I use IBM's Boot Manager (that came with
PartitionMagic 3.0 by PowerQuest).

I have tried installing the BSD boot manager as well, thinking that it
might correctly put itself in the first track of wd2 as the MBR sector. 
Then I would expect IBM boot manager to pass the baton to BSD manager,
which would boot.  It does just that, it seems, but I still can't mount
the root.

Of course, I know no one can just tell me the problem.  But I thought
that you
might muster up some suggestions for me to try out.  I'm very willing to
experiment, but do have to keep a bootable Win95 machine up and going
out of the whole affair.

It is worth noting that I have successfully run this exact OS on this
machine, booting as the second slice of my first harddrive, using the
BSD boot manager.

P.S. I just went back to make sure I had the slice wd2a marked
bootable.  I do, or at least it said CA when I left.  I have yet to
completely build new file systems and reinstall all files since
switching to use of the BSD boot manager.




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?32FFF664.28B2>