Installation woes

Gary W. Swearingen garys at opusnet.com
Fri Sep 16 21:33:33 PDT 2005


Rogelio Rodríguez <q.rs at verizon.net> writes:

> I have Phoenix Award BIOS v6.00PG (as it seems to identify
> itself) and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Plus (ST3120026A) and they
> don't seem to like each other. When partitioning, it's suggested
> that the harddrive geometry seems unlikely though the install
> seems to go off without a problem--tried changing the geometry to
> what the BIOS believes the geometry to be that doesn't work.
> Anywho, it can boot off of the harddrive but can't mount root. At
> the mountroot prompt, '?' tells me that acd0 is the only drive.
> So there's no hard drive after all.
>
> The motherboard is an ABIT KV8 Pro...
>
> Any ideas?

It would help to provide more details, like which version you were
installing and more about the error symptoms.  I'm not sure even what
the mountroot prompt is.  Do you get the "beastie" ASCII art?  Are you
getting a lot of boot messages before it prompts you?  Did any say
anything about ad0 or such?  It seems odd that it would boot the
kernel with /boot/loader, but not find a filesystem to mount, because
that filesystem is the one it should find.  You didn't by any chance
mount /boot on a separate filesystem than /, did you, like in Linux?
You can't easily do that with FreeBSD.

I will say that in the last several years, my big disks have always
been 255/63 heads/sectors in the BIOS, but FreeBSD 5.4 complains
and uses 16/63 and everything works fine.  (I seem to remember it
using 255/63 in 4.X, but maybe my memory's failed me on that.)


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