*BSD News Article 58444


Return to BSD News archive

Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.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: New Install / Observations & Gripes
Date: 8 Jan 1996 08:20:20 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 77
Message-ID: <4cqk44$3gt@agate.berkeley.edu>
References: <DKup49.M1t@bnr.ca>
NNTP-Posting-Host: violet.berkeley.edu

In article <DKup49.M1t@bnr.ca>, Barry Friedman <friedman@bnr.ca> wrote:
>First of all my cdrom is on a soundblaster which had it's port address
>set to 0x340 which defaulted to mcd1 instead of mcd0.  So my first reaction
>to the install procedure which was "WOW - this is a SYSTEM!"  (After 

Yeah, I know, this is a pain.

Just by way of explanation, the original intention was indeed to enable
sysinstall to recognise *either* mcd1 or mcd0 (or scd0/scd1, matcd0/matcd1,
etc) and I did quite a bit of work to allow this to function, but disaster
struck when I ran out of inodes on the boot floppy and I wasn't able to
include the *friggin' device entries* for all the potential 2nd CDROM
controllers in /dev! :-(  Since sysinstall does very crude "device detection"
by basically trying to see which devs it can open and which it can't
(the devinfo stuff also not being ready for prime-time :-( ), this sunk
me.  The kernel finds it, it's there, I just don't have a device entry to
talk to it.  I'm basically waiting for devfs to save our necks here
and divorce device entries from inodes.

>The next problem was that I wanted to install on a second hard-drive
>without messing up a running dos/win3.1 system already installed on
>the first drive.

And it stomped your first drive's boot blocks.  Yeah, I know.
I found and fixed this bug last week. :-(  Sorry about that!

As it turns out, you should have installed the boot manager on the
first drive anyway.  What happened to you next then wouldn't have happened
(not much consolation, I know) and you've have also been able to actually
boot your FreeBSD system off the second drive.  Your standard PC BIOS
can't do it otherwise.

>O.K., I thought, so far so good now let's try the /stand/sysinstall - guess
>what - It would not recognize the cdrom at all (why?). "mount /cdrom" didn't
>help.  I figured that maybe I could go back to the boot floppy and complete

Another bug, and one which I fixed about 2 days after the CD went out.
I know, I know.. :-(  I didn't have any CDROMs around to test this
with until the last moment, and I focused only on installation - I didn't
test it in the post-installation scenario.  I'm working on improving
the QC for this stuff, honest!

>1)  What the heck is the second cd-rom (live filesystem) supposed to be
>used for. (Couldn't find anything on that at all, neither in the 
>little guide or in the docs.)

It's basically just there to save you space.  All the packages and
distributions have been extracted onto it, so you have (for example)
/usr/X11R6 and /usr/local trees from hell that you could conceivably
make link trees to (see the lndir command).

>2)  How do I mount a DOS disk if this is possible?  The mount_msdos man page 
>informs that it doesn't work with post dos 3.3 filesystems and in
>any case it didn't like any of the /dev files I tried.  The FAQ only refers 
>to DOS extended partitions, what about a DOS-only disk.

Assuming your DOS is taking up all of wd0, you might try:

	mount -t msdos /dev/wd0s1 /mnt

There was an opportunity to do this in the label menu, BTW.  You can mount
partitions as well as create them there, and the DOS ones are shown.

>3)  How can I get the boot floppy to automatically boot my wd1(1,a)/kernel
>without having to type it in every time?  (I'm still not brave enough, nor
>do I see how to install the boot manager without re-doing the entire install.)

You can install the boot manager without re-doing the entire install.
It's called `booteasy' and it's in the the tools directory of the CDROM.
Unzip and install it under DOS.  It's a DOS-friendly utility! :)

>Maybe a pointer to the XF86 docs would be in order?

/stand/help/XF86.hlp is what's shown to you in sysinstall's help menu.
That's pretty much most of the docs that I know about! :)

					Jordan