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From: rainman@capital.net (Matt Rainville)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Please Help! Installation Problems
Date: Sat, 21 Sep 1996 08:08:14 GMT
Organization:
Lines: 85
Message-ID: <3243a256.4752478@news.capital.net>
Reply-To: rainman@capital.net
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Help!
I recently downloaded the 2.1.5 release of FreeBSD and am having many
problems getting it loaded and running on my system. I have read
through the FAQ and documentation and am not finding any information
pertaining to my problems...
First off, my system is a p75/40 megs with two western digital 1.2g
IDE hard drives, using an onboard CMD disk conroller. My bios has LBA
translating enabled and I currently have win95 and dos on the 1st hd
and nt on the 2nd drive. I used the FIPS utility to repartition my
first drive, allowing 500 megs for freebsd (from reading the docs, it
is my understanding that with LBA enabled, I can install above the
1024th cylinder, and even when I tried installing below it, i came up
with the same problem).
I downloaded the FreeBSD 2.1.5 binaries from freebsd.org and placed
them in c:\freebsd\bin and also placed a copy of the boot.flp file in
c:\freebsd\floppies. Using the install boot disk, i boot with the -c
option to configure my hardware properly. After that I am brought to
the installation menu and begin the novice installation. I create a
FreeBSD slice using all of the free space created by FIPS and set it
as bootable using the 'S' command (I'm not sure whether or not to do
this, seem to be able to find little info about it) and verify that
the geometry is correct (2484/16/63). I then choose the easyboot (?
believe thats what its called...) boot manager to be placed on the 1st
hd. After that, I allow it to automatically allocate for my root,
/var, /usr and swap 'partitions', select the minimal installation and
select the media as installing from a dos partition and begin the
install. It begins the installation and appears to be ok until the
point where it mounts the msdos filesystem. Here is the output I get
on vty2:
mountmsdosfs():warning:root dir is not a multiple of the clustersize
in length
DEBUG: mounted DOS device (/dev/wd0s1) on /dos
DEBUG: req for bin/bin.tgz from DOS <--(which is not on my sys)
req for bin/bin.inf from DOS
req for bin/bin.aa from DOS
.
bin
bin/cat
bin/chmod
/stand/cpio:invalid header:checksum error
gunzip:stdin:invalid compressed data-format violated
DEBUG: switching back to VTY1
/stand/cpio:premature end of file
In vty1 it reports:
Write failure on transfer (wrote -1 of 1024 bytes)
and of course fails to write the kernel, thus not allowing me to boot
freebsd from the hd or even complete the install. (Yes, I have
downloaded these files twice)
Frustrated, I decided to try to install from floppy
After moving all of the /bin files to floppy disks and placing them
into a:\bin directories I attempted the install again, using the same
procedure as explained above. This time it read the bin files and
completed the install process. However, during this I was watching
through vty2 (with the debugging option turned on) and noticed several
invalid header/checksum errors showed up while reading the 4th or 5th
through 8th disk.... Once the install was complete vty1 gave me a
message that 'makedev returned non zero status'
I was not able to setup any user accounts after the install or for
that matter even the root password. However, i can now boot to
freebsd (or what there is of it that got installed).
I would liketo get the cd-rom, but considering that my phillips drive
is not supported and that the only atapi drivers are beta, I would
much rather install from disk before purchasing it.
If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, please email me at
rainman@capital.net or respond in this newsgroup. I am looking very
forward to using the FreeBSD and learning how to take advantage of the
abilities of the unix platform.
ANY help would be GREATLY appreciated!