From owner-freebsd-questions Tue May 21 08:04:29 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id IAA00462 for questions-outgoing; Tue, 21 May 1996 08:04:29 -0700 (PDT) Received: from m2.sprynet.com (m2.sprynet.com [165.121.1.99]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id IAA00456 for ; Tue, 21 May 1996 08:04:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from 199.174.135.44 (ad08-044.compuserve.com [199.174.135.44]) by m2.sprynet.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id IAA12323 for ; Tue, 21 May 1996 08:05:00 -0700 Message-ID: <31A1E9FE.70BE@canoe.ca> Date: Tue, 21 May 1996 11:06:22 -0500 From: Dave Blizzard Reply-To: blizzard@canoe.ca Organization: The Toronto Sun X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (Macintosh; I; PPC) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD destroys hardware? X-URL: http://www.freebsd.org/support.html Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk After installing FreeBSD successfully on several pentiums I thought I'd give my 386 at home a try. I installed a new SCSI 1gb hard drive and attempted to install BSD on the SCSI drive while leaving my 400mb IDE drive untouched. The operation went great but the patient died Installation went smoothly but I chose to have the boot mgr installed and the result was an unbootable dos drive. After doing the same with another IDE drive and controller the only conclusion is that the boormanager destroys controllers. It's either that or the bootmgr modifies hidden registers in the controller that can't be reset. I have low level formated the drives, repartitioned, attempted fdisk /mbr which is undocumented and apparently does nothing, used Nortones rescue to reload the boot partition and got nowhere. The symptom is that after a BSD install, even to another (scsi) drive, the ide controller I usually boot from cannot fdisk anything anymore, even though the drive seems ok and can be low level formatted. Help! If I buy yet another controller, what is a workable configuration in this case? Should I put root and swap on the ide boot drive? and then let /var take up the SCSI. How can software destroy hardware? Please send any responses to blizzard@canoe.ca ---------------------------------------------------- Dave Blizzard, Corporate Dir of IS VE3SVL The Toronto Sun Publishing Corporation blizzard@canoe.ca -.. . ...- . ...-- ... ...- .-..