*BSD News Article 2601


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From: tgt@exchanger.ecn.purdue.edu (Conan the Librarian)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Another success with 386BSD
Message-ID: <1992Jul27.201358.26609@noose.ecn.purdue.edu>
Date: 27 Jul 92 20:13:58 GMT
Sender: news@noose.ecn.purdue.edu (USENET news)
Organization: Purdue University Engineering Computer Network
Lines: 48


Here's another data point on 386bsd installation.

I (finally) got the OS up and running on my system, which is:

	Gateway 2000 486-33MHz
	ATI Graphics Ultra card
	8 Mb memory
	Conner 202 MB harddisk (IDE)
	Two floppy drives (Epson)
	CDS Jumbo 250 tape drive (attached to floppy controller)

I partitioned my harddisk into a 120MB DOS and an 82MB BSD386 zone.
Then I formatted the DOS partition, restored all my DOS files from tape
and verified that DOS was `happy'.

Next, I used rawrite to transfer the latest dist.fs floppy image (from agate)
onto a 5 1/4" floppy disk, and tried the old cntrl-alt-del with the floppy
in place--no go.  The BIOS headers printed, but then the floppy drive light
came on solid and the system hung indefinitely.  Tried some different things
(disabling shadow RAM, using the dist.fs.debug floppy image, etc.) but with
no change.

Eventually discovered (!!) that "tiny" would come up, but only with a COLD
BOOT...a WARM BOOT always fails.  (Any gurus out there who can tell me 
why this is???)

Once I got "tiny" up and running, the installation went without a hitch.
Kudos to Bill and Lynne not only for putting the OS together, but for also
making the installation so painless!

Did some playing around--added a couple of new users, tried out mail, came
up in "multi-user" mode (I guess that's what you call it when it prompts you
for a login!).  Tried "/usr/distbin/shutdown -todos", but shutdown cried
about not being able to make the DOS partition bootable (this must be a bug...
I've seen someone else who reported the same problem).  SOOO, I cntrl-alt-del
rebooted onto a DOS floppy, and used fdisk to manually set the active harddisk
partition back to DOS.  Simple as that, and I'm back to running DOS on my
harddisk.

Now to buy that 500Mb Fujitsu disk so I can really start hacking in UNIX :-)

-tom
--
Tom Tobin				UUCP:     pur-ee!tgt	
Dept. of ChE				INTERNET: tgt@ecn.purdue.edu
Purdue University			Ma Bell:  home (317) 463-0189
W. Lafayette, IN 47907				  office "   494-4052