misc/84084: FreeBSD 4.11-R won't install to 4th part of 2nd disk

[Gary W. Swearingen]

>Number:         84084
>Category:       misc
>Synopsis:       FreeBSD 4.11-R won't install to 4th part of 2nd disk
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       low
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Mon Jul 25 17:00:29 GMT 2005
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Gary W. Swearingen
>Release:        FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE i386
>Organization:
none
>Environment:
n/a
>Description:
(It DID install to the 2nd part.)

I've tried to install 4.8-RELEASE and 4.11-RELEASE from ISO CD and 4.11-RELEASE
from floppy and FTP and while it gives every indication of installing OK, the
partition that I intended to install to is probably unchanged (I saw old OS
there) and boot0 won't load it.

I tried many times, using existing partitions and sub-partitions (just changing
mount points from "none") and having sysinstall remove the partition and
creating new sub-partitions, etc.

I tried installing 5.4-RELEASE to the same partition and it worked OK.

This was all on the ad2s4 partition.  I have a ad0 and ad2, similar 80 GB drives
each with 4 ~20 GB partitions.

I tried installing 4.11-RELEASE to ad2s2 and it worked fine.

I understand that it might not make sense to debug 4.x now for this kind of
problem, but it sure gave me grief as I needed the smaller memory requirements
of 4.x to build a picobsd firewall and I couldn't manage to cross-compile with
the 4.x sources on my 5.4 system.  I suspect that 4.x will be used for a long
time like this.

I'll leave my ad2s4 available for a while in case I'm asked to run more
experiments on it.

Oh, this is on a Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939 with Athlon64 and 512MB RAM, and I used
the i386 OSes, not the amd64s (if they exist).

On a couple of my failed attempts, I got a "filesystem full" error soon after
it started to load the distributions.  I did a "df" in the emergency terminal
and I don't understand what's going on there with the wierd mount points, etc.,
but I wondered if it was installing to only a memory filesytem.

>How-To-Repeat:
n/a

>Fix:
>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: