*BSD News Article 61152


Return to BSD News archive

Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!reason.cdrom.com!usenet
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Fatal problem with `root.flp' during installation
Date: Sat, 03 Feb 1996 14:28:35 -0800
Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM
Lines: 25
Message-ID: <3113E193.ABD322C@FreeBSD.org>
References: <DM69Dz.14w@uns.bris.ac.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0b6a (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.1-STABLE i386)
To: Simon Trasler <Simon.Trasler@brunel.ac.uk>

Simon Trasler wrote:
> I'm very confused by this, I thought it would just be another file.  Everything
> else goes on OK, but the disk images (`fixit.flp' - I tried this too to see if
> it would work) _always_ fail.

I think you're running into a problem that crept in somewhere between 2.0.5 and 2.1
where the DOS filesystem driver gets really confused by certain combinations of
drive geometries and DOS partitions.  I can't reproduce it here, but enough people
have reported a transfer error on root.flp (which is the first thing actually
xferred off the DOS partition during a DOS installation) that I now have strong
reason to believe that we, somehow, managed to make our already flakey MSDOS
filesystem code even worse.

Happily, someone recently volunteered to be "point man" on the MSDOS filesystem
code recently, and we can only hope to see some improvements there fairly shortly.

My best recommendation to you right at this point is to try the ftp installation
method again, this time figuring out why it didn't work last time.  I've checked
the distribution at ftp.uk.freebsd.org and it looks fine, as are also probably
those at ftp2.uk.freebsd.org and ftp3.uk.freebsd.org - you should be able to suck
any one of those like a greased weasel across that nifty JANET backbone you guys in
the UK have.. :-)
-- 
	- Jordan Hubbard
	  President, FreeBSD Project