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From: americo@et.tudelft.nl
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs
Subject: 386BSD PROBLEMS ??!!
Message-ID: <1993Aug4.172945.951@et.tudelft.nl>
Date: 4 Aug 93 17:29:45 +0200
Reply-To: americo@et.tudelft.nl
Organization: TU-Delft, dpt of Electrical Engineering
Lines: 80
Dear 386bsd users
I'm running 386bsd release 0.1 with maybe a new kernel not very sure about when
was it released. I'm using this system mainly as a mailserver which exchanges
mails via uucp.
First I'd like to tell you that I had problems to get this operating system to
run onto my system, where booting off the hard disk was the main problem. First
the system didn't accept to boot off the Tiny floppy and I had to find a way to
kludge it: To boot off the TINY floppy I 1st placed a blank DOS formatted disk
into the the A: drive and after the known BIOS complaining message I removed
the floppy and inserted tghe Tiny floppy and it sucessfully booted and it does
boot actually in the same way. Then, I run the relevant #install utility and
the system goes through the normal procedure asking whether I'm sure that I
want to install the operating system over the entire disk, etc, etc, until I
get the message that instructs me to remove the Tiny floppy and hit return to
boot off the harddisk.
I followed the instruction and again the system didn't boot off the harddisk in
the same way as used for the floppy disk I was able to boot off the harddisk
and hence continue the installation. Actually I'm able to boot off the harddisk
using other tricks to kludge the system, and one of them is to press any key (
I actually press the spacebar key) during the time that the system is trying to
read some information from the harddisk during the boot process after a re-set
button is pressed, ie, the system first checks the drives ( A:and B: ) and then
checks the HDD ( the C: drive), during this check I press the spacebar and the
system boots off the HDD.
The previous procedure is necessary any time I boot the system.
After that I installed the relevant software, i.e, the other peace of the
operating system including utilities like adduser, crypt, etc, etc and they
work fine.
Because this system is meant to be used as a mailing system I configured the
UUCP to be able to handle incoming calls and hence exchange messages with other
system.
The problem that I'm having is when I'm installing the Smail to handle the mail
posted and received. the procedure called:
# make depend
doesn't complete, it stops without returning any error, and it does stop
anywhere, i.e. when I issue the command at the second time it doesn't stop at
the same place.
Once I was able to install this software, although it didn't executed this
command up to the end I assumed that it had made dependencies enough to allow
me to use the following command that was:
# make
to create the relevant pieces, so I continued and I get the system to work
during 4 months when the system crashed and I unfortunately had to install the
operating system again, because I was not able to access the disk even using
the Fixit floppy, the system wont' accept to mount the disk, this time
returning a message saying that:
mount /dev/wd0a invalid argument ---- I'm sure that my system disk is
wd0a.
Now the questions:
Who of you knows the probable cause of the following problems:
-- Why my system doesnt' boot off the HDD, FD?
-- Why the system wont't accept to install Smail properly?
-- Why the system does lock-up the port frequently? (*)
-- What is the generic PC that is most suitable to run 386bsd?
(*) This is one of the problems that I didnt' describe before, frequently the
process that I guess is UUCICO hangs mostly after a connection through a dialup
call, and this makes the port inaccessible to other incoming calls.
Thanx in advance
Americo