*BSD News Article 73021


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From: Ken Bigelow <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Hackers/EVERYONE please READ THIS!!
Date: Sun, 07 Jul 1996 07:33:33 -0700
Organization: A poorly-installed InterNetNews site
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Benjamin Lim wrote:
> 
> I've been trying to solve this problem for ages now but with no luck.
> 
> People have told me to make my partition with the freebsd source
> smaller (the dos partition) , but I just can't do that cause win95 is
> in it. Can't u hackers just make FreeBSD work with the Adaptec 7850
> and my SEAGATE hard disk? Please read the below article which I posted
> a few days ago...HELP :( And yes, i only have 1 VERY BIG HARD DISK (2
> gigs)...
> 

It doesn't matter how big your hard drive is (my subnet includes 1.2, 1.6, 
and 2 GB drives and they all work fine). However, to boot FreeBSD from hard 
drive, your ROM BIOS must be able to directly 'see' the root slice.

> __________________
> 
> Hi there. I'm having some trouble installing the latest version of
> FreeBSD 2.2 Snap.
> 
> I've downloaded most of the important files and placed it in the
> c:\freebsd directory:
> 
> c:\freebsd\bin
> c:\freebsd\doct
> c:\freebsd\doc
> c:\freebsd\floppies
> c:\freebsd\games
> c:\freebsd\info
> c:\freebsd\manpages
> c:\freebsd\proflibs
> c:\freebsd\xf86312

Okay, fine. As long as the directory names and contents match the 
distribution you're installing.

[Hardware specs snipped]

> My hard disk is a Hawk 2LP Family: ST32430N/ND 2 GIGS
> 
> Checking with PFDISK, this is the info it prints out:
> 
> # Partition table on device: 0
> geometry 261 255 63 (cyls heads sectors)
> #  ID  First(cyl)  Last(cyl)  Name  # start, length (sectors)
> 1   6      0        197       DOSbi # 63, 3180807

FreeBSD seems to like the LBA model of xxxx cyls, 64 heads, 63 sectors. In 
any case, this says you have assigned 1.6 GB to your Win95 partition. 
Loading FreeBSD that far out may not work, even on SCSI. Can your ROM BIOS 
directly see and access the last 400 MB without loading drivers first?

> 
> (there is no partition 2 because i havn't created the freebsd
> partition yet)
> 
> When I try and Install FREEBSD, at the start of the bin distrubution
> and the others I get this error:
> 
> "Write failure on transfer! (wrote -1 bytes of 10240 bytes)"

After installing FreeBSD on a dozen machines, including some lengthy 
testing around this specific error message, I have found that my problem 
and the other indications have always been the same.

Try the installation once more, but this time, as soon as you have answered 
all the questions and begun the installation from the DOS partition, hit 
Alt-F2 and watch the messages there. The /bin distribution comes as a set 
of 240K files (as do the others), and you will see messages as each one is 
requested. If you see a message of 'xxxx bytes of junk discarded' as each 
file is closed, my first place to look would still be slow cache response, 
which you denied in earlier posts.

Try it anyway. Go into the ROM BIOS setup routine and disable the external 
cache (internal cache is in the processor itself, and should have no 
trouble). Then repeat the installation and monitor those Alt-F2 messages. 
Killing or slowing the cache access has always solved the problem for me, 
on multiple motherboards and with different peripheral hardware.


> 
> What is the problem? I am installing from another partition of my hard
> disk and as far as I can tell, freebsd install doesn't even read from
> it but only displays the error!
>

Again -- use Alt-F2. It's very informative. If you still have trouble, 
report the messages you read there.

-- 

Ken

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