Date: Tue, 03 Sep 96 14:05:05 MDT From: johnson@charming.nrtc.northrop.com To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: 2.1.5-RELEASE installation question Message-ID: <9609032105.AA20325@charming.nrtc.northrop.com>
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I have been trying to install Free BSD 2.1.5-RELEASE, and have encountered the problem described below. I did a minimal install from a DOS partition. The install claimed to have completed successfully. Then, when I boot the machine, I get a rather lengthy list of devices, IRQ's, etc., and finally the following message appears: panic: cannot mount root Then, I get a message to the effect that the machine will try to boot again in 15 seconds. One potential source of the problem: I have a 486 DX 33 machine, and I recently upgraded the hard drive from an IDE Conner CP30254 250-meg hard drive to an *E*IDE Maxtor 71626AP 1.7-gig drive. For the larger drive I am using a `SIIG IDE Enhancer' card. To use the card, I go into the standard BIOS setup, and tell the machine that there is no hard drive installed. When I boot the machine up, the SIIG IDE Enhancer card momentarily takes over, and says something to the effect of `probing IDE bus for hard drives.' It then finds the Maxtor drive, and accurately reports the geometry of that disk. With the above SETUP configuration and IDE Enhancer card, DOS comes up fine and finds the 1.7-gig hard drive. Also, the FreeBSD boot floppy for installation comes up fine. Without the card, I cannot get the computer to find the hard disk (I use the auto-configure disk option under the bios SETUP mode, and the machine cannot find the disk.) With the IDE Enhancer card, I was able to set up disk slices, the partitions, etc. with no problems. Moreover, during the installation process I can switch to an alternate screen by hitting <alt>-F4, and get to a unix shell. From there I can look around, and find that the hard drive appears to have had all the required and necessary files correctly installed. (During installation, the hard drive is mounted as /mnt) One possible way to solve my problem would be to use different hardware, i.e., to go with a card for EIDE capability other than the SIIG enhancer card. Or, I might be able to explicitly specify to the BIOS SETUP mode the characteristics of the Maxtor EIDE disk and just use the first 500 or so megs of the drive as a dos partition. Is there some canonical hardware solution that is known by the FreeBSD community to work when upgrading an old 486 system to support large EIDE disk drives? Alternatively, is there some kernel configuration trick or other installation technique that will work with my current configuration? (This would of course be the preferred option.) Thanks for any help! Greg Johnson johnson@nrtc.northrop.com
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