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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.bhp.com.au!mel.dit.csiro.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.cis.okstate.edu!news.ksu.ksu.edu!news.physics.uiowa.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!gt-news!cc.gatech.edu!not-for-mail From: cau@cc.gatech.edu (Carlos Ugarte) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Install prob w/ 2.1R - cannot mount root on mixed IDE/SCSI Date: 30 Jan 1996 00:24:05 -0500 Organization: College of Computing, Georgia Tech Lines: 63 Message-ID: <4eka1l$m8k@oscar.cc.gatech.edu> References: <4eggo7$cu@oscar.cc.gatech.edu> <4eh1ef$9nn@times.tfs.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: oscar.cc.gatech.edu NNTP-Posting-User: cau julian@mailhub.tfs.com (Julian Elischer) writes: [description of my problem booting on a SCSI w/ 2 IDEs skipped] >I'm not sure if the '-a' option works on the bootblocks >if it does you shoulkd be able to use sd(2,a)/kernel and then use >sd0 when the kernel stops to ask about root disks.. Nope, don't think it did. This is the first time I ever work with FreeBSD (from an admin point of view), so I can't really say, but it did not prompt me for the root filesystem. >what you COULD do to get yourself up and going would be to >disable (in the bios) your IDE drives, and use sd(0) as the >boot response >UNIX will still see the IDE drives but the BIOS won't >you'll need to enable them before OS@ and DOS will see them again though. This, on the other hand, worked great. Previously, I had not even been able to boot into it, but by disabling the IDEs in the BIOS (and having installed a "normal" boot sector on the SCSI), it booted into FreeBSD fine. >probably you should (once you are up) look at >/usr/src/sys/i386/bootblocks/biosboot/boot.c >(and it's friends and try figure out the correct parameters to pass to the >kernel as it's booting, compile them in by default >and reinstall that new bootblock..) And then I started poking around. After quite a while, I discovered that a one line change did the trick for me. In the boot.c mentioned above, there's a line with something like "MAKEBOOTDEV(...)". It turns out that one of the parameters it was passing (the variable unit) changed values depending on whether or not the IDEs were enabled in the BIOS. If the IDEs were disabled, unit=0. If the IDEs were enabled, unit=1. Once again, this was with two IDEs and one SCSI (trying to boot off the SCSI). So hardcoding unit=0 (before MAKEBOOTDEV) did the trick. I guess it's getting confused (wd0, wd1, therefore it must be sd2). Then like you said, recompile and reinstall, and I was set to go. I can now boot off directly (IDEs disabled, boots directly into FreeBSD) or from OS-BS, or from OS/2's Boot Manager. Incidentally, I tried changing it earlier (at the "Boot:" prompt), but if I did it then, then the loader wouldn't find the kernel if the IDEs were enabled (if they were disabled, everything's great). Thus for the first part, unit had to =2 (if IDEs were enabled). >I know what I want to do to fix it and you MIGHT have given me the excuse.. >I'll look at a fix this weekend. Thanks for the help, Julian. Hope the rest of my stay with FreeBSD will be less troublesome :) Carlos -- Carlos A. Ugarte cau@cc.gatech.edu Author of PageMage, a virtual desktop util for OS/2 http://www.cc.gatech.edu/people/home/cau/ Computer Science Senior at Georgia Tech