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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!inquo!news.uoregon.edu!mars.efn.org!usenet From: Michelle Brownsworth <michellb@efn.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: FreeBSD Boot Problem On New Install Date: 31 Jan 1996 07:55:01 GMT Organization: Oregon Public Networking Lines: 37 Message-ID: <4en78l$mpq@mars.efn.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: dynip59.efn.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.1N (Macintosh; I; 68K) X-URL: news:comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc I'm having a problem getting a new FreeBSD installation to boot. A little background: In preparation for installing FreeBSD, I bought a new Western Digital 1.6 GB drive. It was to have one 528K DOS partition and the remaining 1+ GB was to be allocated to FreeBSD. Since I have an IDE CD drive that is unsupported, I XCOPIED the dists to the DOS partition's FreeBSD directory, and did a FreeBSD install from DOS. I opted to have the BootEasy boot manager installed in the boot blocks so I could boot either DOS or FreeBSD. Unfortunately, I had an older non-translating BIOS that was limited to 1024 cylinders (528K) without employing yet another boot manager that would trick the BIOS. So, I bit the bullet and upgraded to a translating BIOS. After it was installed, I booted the computer for the first time, got the BootEasy menu, and chose F2 (FreeBSD). But instead of booting FreeBSD, the menu kept reappearing with F? as the default. I went back to the documentation, in particular, the hardware troubleshooting docs, which addressed this very problem. It stated that the problem was most likely wrong disk geometry, and that the solution was to reinstall FreeBSD, taking care to ensure the geometry was correct. So I did that. The partitioning editor correctly recognized the drive geometry (3148 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors/track) and I proceeded to the label editor, and so forth through the rest of the install, which went fine. But when I rebooted and selected F2 from the BootEasy menu--uh oh--same problem. I went back and doublechecked everything--and I do mean everything--again, but no joy. So, I'm stymied. What should be a fairly straight-forward install has turned into quite a thrash... Anybody have any ideas? Thanks in advance, \\ichelle