Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997 01:33:09 -0700 From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@monkeys.com> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Bummer... Trying to install WITHOUT DOS Message-ID: <6288.873966789@monkeys.com>
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Greetings, I just got the FreeBSD 2.2.2 VCD ROM from Walnut Creek and made the requsite boot floppy from it, as directed. The boot floppy boots up to the Boot: brompt OK, but then after about 5 seconds it takes off running and just generates a long stream of repeating device errors of some sort. Needless to say, I am not pleased. I'm trying to do this whole install without the benefit of any of that crud from Redmond in touching my system, but so far I seem to be failing pretty badly. So please gimme the clue I need to get rolling. Obviously, the boot prompt wants me to type in some special incantation which will cause the rest of the boot process to proceed to suck a kernel off of the CD-ROM (and yes... I _do_ have that loaded into the drive) but I have no idea what the exact response is that I need to give to the boot prompt to make this happen. The README.TXT files seemed to suggest that the code on the boot floppy would automatically detect my CD-ROM drive, but it doesn't seem to be happening. My hardware is as follows: P100 ASUS Motherboard (good quality) ASUS SC-200 SCSI controller (NCR based) 1 ancient Toshiba 3401 SCSI CD-ROM drive (2x) 1 equally anciant Quantum 540MB SCSI drive (Maverick 540S) NOTE: The hard disk is set to SCSI Device ID #0 and the SCSI CD-ROM is set to SCSI Device ID #4. I don't believe that this hardware supports booting direct from the CD-ROM, so I _do_ believe that I probably need to start from the boot floppy, BUT THEN WHAT? The hard drive in question was previously in use on a Sparcstation and has Sparc/SunOS on it. It probably doesn't even have the usual DOS/Windows 4 partition map in the boot block so I have to start from scratch as far as this drive is concerned. Please tell me that you are NOT going to force me to format this drive under (yeccch) DOS and then load FreeBSD into that just to get FreeBSD installed!!! I believe that there's just GOT to be another way to skin this cat. Just please tell me how. Thanks in advance. -- Ron Guilmette, Roseville, California ---------- E-Scrub Technologies, Inc. -- Deadbolt(tm) Personal E-Mail Filter demo: http://www.e-scrub.com/deadbolt/ -- Wpoison (web harvester poisoning) demo: http://monkeys.com/cgi-bin/wpoison
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