Sysinstall: No Floppy Devices Found

Dan Mahoney, System Admin danm at prime.gushi.org
Mon Sep 3 20:58:41 PDT 2007


On Tue, 16 Jan 2007, Kevin Kobb wrote:

> I have found that when I do an install with an install.cfg file on a floppy, 
> I must insert the floppy right after the system begins to boot from CD. If I 
> don't when I tell sysinstall to read the floppy I get an error.
>
> As a work around, if I go into the options and select rescan for hardware 
> devices (not sure if that is the exact wording) after inserting the floppy 
> disk, it will work OK as well. Might be worth a try.

No luck.  I've rescanned time after time, and get nothing.  No sloppy 
devices show up in dmesg, cannot use mount_msdosfs to access the floppy, 
etc.

This is truly, truly frustrating, as I am trying to follow THESE 
instructions:

http://3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=14850

I've even tried installing to an external (non-raid) drive in an attempt 
to use that drive as a "really big floppy".  The boot loader doesn't know 
how to see the BSD partition on it, and apparently can only see "raw" bios 
drives.

Another possible approach was to try and boot from the single drive and 
then use sysinstall to install onto the RAID array, but I've had issues 
with that before.

As an aside, the module HAS to be loaded before the boot process, so I 
can't use kldload to load the module from a fixit floppy or something like 
that.

My workaround at the moment is that I am downloading a snapshot ISO of 
-STABLE

It might be nice if the "loading modules from floppy" procedure (while 
rarely required) was better documented.

-Dan

--

"It's three o'clock in the morning.  It's too late for 'oops'.  After
Locate Updates, don't even go there."

-Paul Baecker
  January 3, 2k
  Indeed, sometime after 3AM

--------Dan Mahoney--------
Techie,  Sysadmin,  WebGeek
Gushi on efnet/undernet IRC
ICQ: 13735144   AIM: LarpGM
Site:  http://www.gushi.org
---------------------------



More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list