*BSD News Article 26693


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From: mopar+@pitt.edu (Jerome A Marella)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: FreeBSD with MFM disks?
Message-ID: <13328@blue.cis.pitt.edu>
Date: 30 Jan 94 01:47:00 GMT
References: <13069@blue.cis.pitt.edu> <2i90cc$ekt@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <wilko.759747597@spoetnix.idca.tds.philips.nl>
Sender: news+@pitt.edu
Organization: University of Pittsburgh
Lines: 52

In article <wilko.759747597@spoetnix.idca.tds.philips.nl> wilko@idca.tds.philips.nl (Wilko Bulte) writes:
>nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Nate Williams) writes:
>
>>In article <13069@blue.cis.pitt.edu>, Jerome A Marella <mopar+@pitt.edu> wrote:
>>> Anyway while trying to install FreeBSD last night everything
>>> was going fine until it started to make the root filesystem on the 
>>> disk (Maxtor). It didn't give any errors other the the no disk label error.
>
>>If it didn't give any error other than the no disklabel error what's the
>>problem?  What happened when it started to make the root filesystem on the
>>disk?
>
>And yes, I have a 386/16 with an oldie 40Mb ST506 disk. Installation of 1.0.2
>went well, apart from the fact that the install procedure didn't 'bad144' the
>badblocks correctly into the badblock admin in the disk.
>
>So, it isn't impossible ;-)
>
>But more info on the actual problem is needed to determine what goes wrong.

Yes, I was hasty in my post after getting frustrated when it didn't install.
Hopefully I won't do that again....

It complained that there was no label on the disk and didn't make the
filesystem. When it tried to mount the root filesystem, it complained that the
superblock was bad. So I assume it never made the filesystem.

I tried copying the boot and fs disks again (from the ftp site) too make sure 
there were no errors during the copying. but the same thing happened.

I had to rewrite the fs disk after every time it failed. If I didn't it would
not mount the floppy the next time I tried to use it.

I noticed that a lot of the time the fs floppy was mounted read-only for some
reason. I used both 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" disks and I know how to tell if they are
write enabled.

I have since used the NetBSD install disks and it worked without problems. The
installation processes don't seem to be very different between the two, so I 
don't know why the FreeBSD install didn't work.

Jerome

--
Jerome A. Marella
Computing and Information Services, University of Pittsburgh
mopar+@pitt.edu
-- 
--
Jerome A. Marella
Computing and Information Services, University of Pittsburgh
mopar+@pitt.edu