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From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: *** Is FreeBSD easy to install ??? ***
Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 16:10:05 -0700
Organization: Me
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Message-ID: <3260254D.537AA5C1@lambert.org>
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Martin v.Loewis wrote:
] Not exactly my experience. The first time I considered FreeBSD,
] I found that it needs a primary partition, and I had only
] logical drives left.
This is typically the case when your boot manager (which is not
a part of the OS) can not boot off of "extended partitions".
Most boot managers can not boot off of extended partitions.
Further, extended partitions, since they must exist in a primary
paritions, are themselves limeted to 2G in size. This is typically
unacceptable for operating systems which do not force you to
divide your drive up into tiny chunks to make the FS waste only
a "reasonable" amount of space (notably: DOS and Windows 95).
] When I got a new hard drive, I reserved a primary partition
] for FreeBSD - just to find out that the ATAPI boot floppy
] would not recognize my CD-ROM drive. I later learned that
] you have to disable the third and fourth IDE hard disk (at
] least in 2.1.0), but this doesn't help if you don't have
] a running installation.
Actually, you can do this in the visual configuration utility,
which you get to via booting "-c" at the boot prompt, just
like it says in the install notes.
The ATAPI "standard" is well known to be insufficiently
specific to allow you to successfully probe all ATAPI hardware
with one driver without damaging the ability to let more
sane people (who don't buy IDE hardware) continue to use
older models of MFM, RLL, and ESDI controllers (most notably
trashed by a technically "conforming" ATAPI driver, the WD1007
ESDI controller).
To limit the possiblity of damaging your already installed
hardware, the CDROM targets are expected to be slave targets.
This is eminently reasonable, when you consider that some WD
IDE drives (ie: Caviar) will not operate correctly as slaves
for IDE "master" drives from other manufacturers (ie: Conner).
It is making the best of a bad situation (the situation which
allows IDE hardware to exist at all in the first place: market
forces instead of the forces of technical merit).
] So I ended up copying the CD-ROM onto the only FAT partition
] on a primary disk, which had little space left - I couldn't
] install the system in one run.
]
] I would not call this supereasy installation.
Agreed.
The answer should be modified from "yes" to "yes, on non-marginal
hardware".
I will observe that you *were* able to install at all, though.
8-).
Note that marginal hardware support has improved recently, so
you may wish to try a more recent installation package (like
the 2.2-SNAP which was just on comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.announce).
As more information is found out about the difference between
"conforms to ATAPI" and "works with an ATAPI conforming driver",
more special cases will be incorporated, and the situation will
continue to improve... though I suspect it will be several years
of revisions until the ATAPI standard is finally as robust as
the SCSI standard has become (SCSI had similar problems in the
first couple of years it was available, FWIW).
Regards,
Terry Lambert
terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.