Hell of a time

[Bill Moran]

John McClure wrote:
> Somebody pleeeaaasse help.
> 
> I've been trying to install 5.0-RELEASE on an old Dell
> 600MHz P3. Sysinstall works fine, no issues there. No
> issues at all until I get the final "do-or-die"
> message and then whammo! There's a problem with
> /mnt/usr.
> 
> Also, the root partition takes a very large amount of
> space. I've read the handbook, and also "Absolute BSD"
> and they both indicate that the root partition should
> take around 128MB of space. But my install won't take
> that at all. I'm choosing to install "All", source,
> executables, the whole shebang. But still, it doesn't
> seem that the 1G of space I'm allocating jives at all
> with the stated 128MB requirement? What's up with
> that?

I've never needed more than ~100M for / ... and that's
after cvsup created a kernel.old and modules.old.
However ... that's assuming that I put /var, /tmp, and
some other trees on different filesystems.  Depending
on your filesystem layout, you might need considerably
more for / than 128 M.
What filesystems are you configuring when you partition
the disk?  If you're fairly new to FreeBSD, you may
have good luck with the (A)uto option in the partition
program.
Also, the nature of the error seems to indicated that
it's not / that's the problem, but /usr.  How big is the
/usr partition, and how much stuff are you installing?
/usr can be a LOT of space if you want to install a lot.
The /usr on this machine uses 2.3G, and I've even got
/usr/src and /usr/ports NFS mounted from another machine.

> So ... Any suggestions? My system is pretty vanilla,
> no unusual hardware, just a stock Dell system from
> three years ago, although it's got a DVD and CD/RW.
> Anyone please help.

Post the details of your partition layout to the list, and
we'll give you some more detail on what we suspect the
problem is.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com