Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!usenet2.news.uk.psi.net!uknet!usenet1.news.uk.psi.net!uknet!uknet!lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk!sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk!cs.city.ac.uk!colin
From: colin@cs.city.ac.uk (Colin Bridgeman)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Notebook Installation problems...
Date: 9 Jul 1996 15:37:32 GMT
Organization: School of Informatics, City University
Lines: 65
Message-ID: <4rtubs$lt3@bambam.soi.city.ac.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: fred.soi.city.ac.uk
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
Hi BSD-lovers,
You may recall that about a week ago I posted an article requesting
information about running FreeBSD on a laptop (thanks for the pointer
to the Mobile Computing homepage). Well since then I've got the
laptop and various PCMCIA cards with lofty visions of the world of
BSD-on-the-move opening up to me and giving it the full Sex, Violence
and home-cooking mix... then reality stepped in and now I have these
perplexing problems.
The configuration I'm running with is:
o Toshiba Portege 610 CT
o 16Mb RAM
o 90MHz Pentium
o 800Mb Hard Disc FreeBSD 2.1 (January 1996)
o Sony PRD-250 Quad speed CD-ROM
o Adaptec PCMCIA SCSI II Card (FCC ID: FGT1460/IC-DM10)
When I first tried this from a FreeBSD boot floppy it would boot
and try scanning the aic0 device at 0x340. It'd see the CD-ROM and
give me some B.S. about failing the ready to ready transition. After
that it'd report that there was a CD in the drive, give me details of
the number of records and then show the installation menu. When I
tried to select CD-ROM as the installation medium, it'd say that it
hadn't detected any CD-ROM devices.
For some reason when I boot from a FreeBSD boot floppy now, it
thinks that the aic0 device is disabled, or it will say that the aic0
wasn't found at 0x340. I've tried booting with the `-c' switch and
turning off most everything except aic0, fd0 and the IDE driver, but
to no avail. The best I can get out of it is that the ze0 and zp0
drivers correctly read the information about the SCSI card in the
PCMCIA slots and then we have no CD-ROM devices.
I've picked up the pccard-flp-960418 from the site in Japan and
this is marginally better in that this boot floppy will assign the
aic0 to address 0x340.. but then unfortunately assigns interrupt
vector 10 rather than 11. After this config starts and I get the
install menu there're no CD-ROM devices and I can't mount the fixit
floppy (not that I'd really have much of an idea how to proceed had
this worked!!).
Oddly enough if I boot MESS-DOS and then run D:\INSTALL.BAT it'll
start and still attempts to scan aic0, giving the B.S. about the
ready to ready transition.. of course at the stage where it should
give you the install menu it gives nothing but a blank screen with a
block cursor in the bottom left of the screen!
Anyone out there got an (useful) suggestions?
I've got FreeBSD 2.0.5 running at home on a 90MHz Pentium with about
4Gb of disc storage on 2 IDE drives and 1 SCSI drives, but I'm never
there long enough to actually use this machine so I thought I'd give
the notebook option a whirl.
Peace ..,
\z\(gr>
P.S.
If this problem is too easy I have other FreeBSD-related queries to
tax your grey cells :-)