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From: sfurber@rip.psg.com (Steven Furber)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Reinstalling FreeBSD problems
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 1994 14:01:38
Organization: SCS, Inc.
Lines: 34
Message-ID: <sfurber.5.000E0761@rip.psg.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: sfurber.rain.com
X-Newsreader: Trumpet for Windows [Version 1.0 Rev A]
I am having problems reinstalling FreeBSD on my machine. ("My machine" being
an 486DX2 with an Adaptec 1542C SCSI host adapter and a 1025mb Fujitsu drive.)
When I originally installed FreeBSD my machine only had 4mb of ram. Since then
I have upgraded to 16mb. My original installation seemd to work pretty well.
When I installed, I accepted all of the defaults when it came to drive
configuration. Great- it installed and booted without any problems.
Unfortunately, after I played around with the machine for a few days I noticed
that fsck was reporting a lot more errors than I would expect. (And no, I
don't use the MS-DOS approach to shutting down a system: I actually take the
time to type out "halt" and wait 20 seconds for the machine to quit, even
though it really does seem soooooo much more inefficient than unplugging the
machine (smirk)).
My 16mb of ram came and my original installation seemed to work fine with it.
I had XFree86 running, I recompiled my kernel, I even got most of PC-NFS
setup. But, the disk errors continued. After losing termcap and gcc, I decided
it was time to reinstall.
I have now gone through the installation a zillion times today. (Back in the
days of 'ROM-less *NIX installs my fingers would be a bloody pulp from playing
with floppies.)
Unfortunately, none of my attempts has worked. If I accept the defaults I my
machine will re-cycle through booting. If I accept the defaults with the
except that I tell BSD to only use 1818 cyclinders from my drive, my machine
will get to "Checking Memory" and then get some sort of illegal instruction.
Anyone have any ideas why I can't re-install? The only difference in harware
between my first installation and the re-instalation is the 16mg.
Help....?