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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!jkh From: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu (Jordan K. Hubbard) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: 2.0.5-ALPHA install Date: 3 Jun 1995 01:43:14 GMT Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 32 Message-ID: <3qoeni$71v@agate.berkeley.edu> References: <87hh69ixsc.fsf@interbev.mindspring.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: violet.berkeley.edu In article <87hh69ixsc.fsf@interbev.mindspring.com>, Robert Sanders <rsanders@interbev.mindspring.com> wrote: >I'm having a hell of a time with 2.0.5-ALPHA. After several problems >just getting the bindist installed (I'll detail these later), I >finally tried to reboot into what was supposed to be a happy system. >It may be; the kernel never even gets off the ground. I think you're suffering from the "truncated bindist" problem. You see, the boot floppies (well, the root floppy if you want to get technical) contain `info' files now that tell the installation process how many pieces to ftp when Joe User asks for a given distribution. Sometime between when I rolled the original ALPHA dist and when I rolled the latest alpha floppies, something got smaller (I believe it was me removing some redundant docs) and the count for the bindist was thrown off; the floppies were expecting only 59 pieces and the old dist had 60. So they were only grabbing all but the last piece which, by an odd and tragic coincidence, was where the very last part of the kernel lived! This resulted in _very_ weird system behavior, the fact that the kernel lived long enough to boot at all in many situations being a great mystery to me - it's was like someone walking around with half their brain shot away! I've since adjusted the bindist files on freefall and wcarchive to match the newer boot floppies and all should work well - check your debugging screen (with "Extra debuggin" turned on) to see if it's trying to load 59 or 60 pieces. Jordan