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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!pacbell.com!amdahl!amdahl!agc From: agc@uts.amdahl.com (Alistair G. Crooks) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs Subject: FreeBSD 1.0 Sept 13th floppies Summary: Close, but no cigar. Message-ID: <89at03uedatl00@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> Date: 16 Sep 93 09:14:34 GMT Organization: Amdahl Corporation, Sunnyvale CA Lines: 49 I tried the new FreeBSD 1.0 floppies (13th Sept ones) last night, and this is what I found out: My target disc is an st2383a, supposedly IDE disc, but it doesn't automatically forward bad blocks, so I've called it an st506 during installation. There are 1747 cylinders, 7 heads and 54 sectors on this disc. I tried installing FreeBSD on a 486DX2/66, and on a 386SX/16, using the same disc. The split binary and source archive filenames were changed from bin.tar.gz.aa to bintargz.aa before I put them onto the DOS floppies. 1. Installing on the 486 DX2/66 failed miserably. During the scan of the disc to initialise the bad144 table, the drive hanges with the disc access light on solidly. This is reproducible, and occurs after the first two bad sectors have been found. 2. Moved the same disc onto the 386SX/16. Managed to install FreeBSD 1.0 onto the disc, but only by maxing out the disc at 1024 cylinders. As it can be installed on a 386SX but not on the faster beast, this points to a timing problem in the wd driver. (BTW I was getting the wd hangs with light on solid on 386bsd 0.1 with this disc too) 3. I can't read the DOS disc - the mount of the DOS floppy fails with an invalid argument (I tried this manually, as well, and that's definitely the problem). This also happenned with the previous floppies, so we still can't install from DOS floppies. I'm sure it's something silly I was doing (fstab entry?), but as the I didn't have much time , I copied the NetBSD (0.9) mread onto a BSD floppy, mounted and copied that and used that mread to get the stuff off floppies. 4. When attempting to do a "cat bintargz.* | gunzip -c | tar tvf -" I managed to get another disc hang with the drive light on solidly again. 5. To be a bit more positive: a) The cylinder stuff during partition sizing is nice, but why can't we just specify partition size in Megabytes, and the install program will calculate the nearest cylinder boundary to this? b) The scanning for bad blocks is WONDERFUL, and MUCH better in the 13th September floppies. c) I like the warning messages, and the whole installation procedure is very professional now. Hope this helps... Alistair -- Alistair G. Crooks (agc@uts.amdahl.com) +44 252 346377 Amdahl European HQ, Dogmersfield Park, Hartley Wintney, Hants RG27 8TE, UK. [These are only my opinions, and certainly not those of Amdahl Corporation]