*BSD News Article 59057


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From: dcmyers@access4.digex.net (David Myers)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Fatal installation errors
Date: 8 Jan 1996 20:27:29 -0500
Organization: Express Access Online Communications USA: 800-969-9090
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Message-ID: <4csga1$jhf@access4.digex.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: access4.digex.net





After deciding that my NCR810-based SCSI card was simply incompatible with
my PnP BIOS, I chucked it and picked up an Adaptec 2940.  After a much more
promising boot from floppy, I began the installation process.  SCSI device
0 is a 1 gig Quantum Fireball drive; SCSI 4 is my NEC CDROM.  The Quantum
was formatted with 100MB for DOS and 940 for FreeBSD.

The installation begins fine, but about 20% - 30% of the way into it, it
quits, saying:

Write failure on transfer (-1 of 10240 bytes transferred)

Thanks to previous correspondence with people in this group, I have some
suspicion that my CDROM is not a good SCSI citizen, and may be causing
problems on the bus.  I already had to disable SCSI parity checking in the
Adaptec BIOS, because the NEC doesn't support it.  However, I thought I
would post this to the group, and see if anyone else has had similar
experiences.  Can anybody give me a clue as to what might be going on?

As an experiment, I then tried using the IDE CDROM boot floppy option.
This actually proceeds quite a bit further, but at a random point will fail
with the message:

kernel panic: page fault

Don't know if that information helps any.

I would appreciate any suggestions from the group.

-David.





-- 
________________________________________
David C. Myers
dcmyers@access.digex.net