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Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!eff!world!ksr!dhb@ksr.com From: dhb@ksr.com (Don Barstow) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: [386bsd] Installs ok, hard drive won't boot - not the FAQ Message-ID: <17935@ksr.com> Date: 2 Nov 92 10:15:26 EST Sender: news@ksr.com Followup-To: poster Organization: Kendall Square Research Corp. Lines: 59 I have a problem where I can boot the tiny BSD disk, install it on my hard drive in a partition, and then when I reboot, the system panics because it can't find a disk label and can't mount the root. I have tried the Chris D. new bootables - no difference. I read the FAQ and tried running at slow CPU speed - also no difference. So now, here is my configuration - Dell DX2/66 EISA with Ultrastor 12F ESDI controller, Micropolis 327 (344?) MB disk, MS-DOS partition of 80 MEG, leaving 247 for BSD. The Tiny disk boots fine, finds the disk controller, and does everything OK. I can even ^Z in the middle of the install, and 'ls' the hard drive, as it is mounted on /mnt, and see all the files that install is putting over there. When the hard boot fails (and re-boots and fails over and over again!), I boot up the fixit disk, run disklabel, and get bad news. There is no disk label found on the 'a' partition, and the 'd' partition label looks bad: # size offset fstype [fsize bsize cpg] a: 499968 164304 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 163 - 650) The size and offset look OK, but where is the file system that install created? I have several ideas, but don't have a lot of PC experience, so I am not too sure which avenues would be most promising to chase: 1. It's kind of like after rebooting any kernel, it no longer agrees with install about where the disk labels should be found. Is there any way they could disagree about where the partitions exist on the disk after a reboot? Or after changing the active partition that the BIOS uses for booting? 2. Would a correct disktab entry for this disk help? With this I could use the fixit disk to hand create the file system. But to do that, I would need to know how to deal with the MS-DOS partition, and how to hand create the BSD partition. 3. The Ultrastor controller is supposedly doing some kind of "63 sector" mapping of the disk, but I thought this would affect only DOS. I know how to change the settings in the controller's ROM, but didn't know what effect that would have. The cylinder numbers above sound like the numbers DOS is using with the mapping, rather than the actual numbers (like 1780) for this drive. 4. Could there be something about the EISA environment or the high speed CPU that is a problem? The Dell has an integral IDE controller on the board that is not being used, but has the same addresses as the Ultrastor board, and I don't know if that could confuse the kernel at all - but then why would the dist.fs floppy boot OK? That is all I have for the moment. Any help would be greatly appreciated. This 66 DX2 is blazing under DOS in comparison to the 386-25 I have been using, and I would really like to get BSD up on it. If you have anything at all that would allow me to move forward, I would like to hear it. Thanks in advance, Don Barstow dhb@ksr.com