*BSD News Article 31682


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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.uwa.edu.au!info.curtin.edu.au!griffith
From: griffith@cs.curtin.edu.au (Don Griffiths)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: [FreeBSD] Problem booting from HD
Date: 16 Jun 94 06:30:23 GMT
Organization: Curtin University of Technology
Lines: 43
Message-ID: <griffith.771748223@marsh>
References: <griffith.771232492@marsh> <Cr6rKM.A2F@hippo.ru.ac.za>
NNTP-Posting-Host: vincent.cs.curtin.edu.au

csgr@cs.ru.ac.za (Geoff Rehmet) writes:

>In <griffith.771232492@marsh> griffith@cs.curtin.edu.au (Don Griffiths) writes:

>>G'Day,

>>I've just installed FreeBSD 1.1 GENERICAH#0 on a 386DX33 pc with
>>a Plus Impluse 120AT IDE hard drive. It boots fine from floppy 
>>but I cannot get it to boot from the HD after copying the kernel
>>to it.  I can direct the floppy to load the kernel from the HD 
>>but each time I try to boot it from the HD direct, I get the 
>>message "Missing Operating System".  The PC has previously had
>>MS-DOS 6.2 on the HD.  Any Ideas?
>>Don Griffiths.

>This looks like FreeBSD and your BIOS have different ideas about your
>disk's geometry.  (When booting, FreeBSD uses the BIOS to load the kernel).

Yes, this was the problem.  My CMOS gave the geometry as 900 cyl, 15 heads &
17 sec/cyl but BSD found 814 cyl, 9 heads & 32 sec/cyl.  Changing the CMOS
to what BSD thought it was solved the problem......

Now I've got a new one :-(

I got to the point of extracting the bin.tar file when part way through it
gave a segmentation violation.  I attempted to restart it only to have it
report that it couldn't find tar!.  I halted the system to reboot but on
rebooting it gave the message "panic: init died" and then proceeded to 
reboot itself adnausium.  I've rebooted using the initial boot floopy &
rfs and found that the filesystem is still on the HD and appears ok. What
do I do now? (Short of repeating the entire install?)

Don Griffiths.
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