*BSD News Article 39951


Return to BSD News archive

Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msunews!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!news2.near.net!info-server.bbn.com!clements
From: clements@bbn.com (Bob Clements)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.0R installation problem
Date: 29 Dec 1994 14:15:16 GMT
Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN)
Lines: 53
Message-ID: <3dug9k$121@info-server.bbn.com>
References: <1994Nov25.173906.29357@sandia.gov> <3b8fhl$mg@news-rocq.inria.fr>
NNTP-Posting-Host: lion.bbn.com

Hi.

I'm having the exact set of errors mentioned in the following message:

Alan F Lundin (aflundi@sandia.gov) wrote:
: The first several times I tried to boot the boot floppy,
: it failed as the kernel tried to switch to the floppy
: device as root.  After doing a hardware reset, it did
: make the switch OK and I went through the boot installation.

Same thing happened to me.

: When I boot now from the hard disk, everything goes fine until
: it asks for the cpio floppy, but is unable to read it.
: The debug screen just says "gunzip input/output error".
: There is a message on the install screen, but it goes away
: far too fast to read, that looks like a fd driver debug line.
: The floppy then becomes unavailable in any fashion until
: I do a hardware reset, at which time the controller recognises
: it again.  I'm using a Bt445S SCSI controller and the
: floppy controller on it for the single floppy drive I have.

Again, exactly the same errors happen for me, except I have no SCSI
stuff in the box yet.  My FD controller is a generic AT multi-IO card
which also drives the IDE HD.

: --alan
: -- 
: Alan Lundin <aflundi@sandia.gov>


I've tried two different floppy drives, many blank floppies,
some pre-formatted and some I formatted, many permutations of
copying the cpio floppy, including writing it on two
different source machines, and doing a MS-DOS diskcopy on it
before putting it in the FreeBSD machine.  I've tried leaving the
floppy out of the drive during the discovery sequence and also
putting it in during discovery.

I can't get beyond this point.

System config:  486-DX2-66, 8 Meg RAM, 1 1.44 FD, 420 MB Conner IDE,
80 MB in slice 1 for MS-DOS, the rest in slice 3 for FreeBSD 2.0,
using the Walnut Creek 2.0 CD-ROM.  Also tried the Christmas-ish
snapshot of the cpio.flp file from ftp.freebsd.org.  So I assume it
must be the boot kernel itself.

I'm stuck.  Any advice?

Thanks,
/Rcc

Bob Clements, K1BC, clements@bbn.com