more on Problem Report i386/39574

[Doug White]

cc: ing your other mail address for coverage

I read the PR and your followup to it. Insulting people is not going to
get the problem fixed.

On Tue, 12 Aug 2003, Paul Lambert wrote:

> I have obtained version 5.1 of FreeBSD and attempted to install it.  Still
> get the same errors though not as much detail is given.  The error reads
> "unable to transfer .... from ufs" where ... represents the specific
> distribution such as /manpages, /dist, etc.

This sounds like bad hardware (drive, controller, cable, or disc itself)
since the drive is having problems reading the CD.

Without further details, like dmesg and output from the error console
(Alt-F2 in sysinstall), its hard to pin down.  Typically in this instance
I'd recommend installing FreeBSD on another system, moving the disk drive
over, and booting with -v to see if the error persists and get more
details.

This would be more interesting if more people were reporting problems like
this. One off PRs are usually due to local circumstances and are not
indicitive of a bug.

> When performing a mount command while in the "fixit" shell I get /dev/acd0
> on /dist (cd9660, local, read-only).  Previous documentation always
> referred to the CDROM drive as /dev/cd0c, especially in the FreeBSD
> handbook.  Is our problem a typo?

acd is an ATAPI CDROM; cd is a SCSI CDROM.

> I have reviewed the first several chapters of the publication "FreeBSD" by
> Walnut Creek that I obtained when version 4.4 was released.  Between
> reading the www.freebsd.org web and this publication it is not totally
> clear if I still need a floppy boot disk.  Maybe this is the problem.  The
> book seems to imply that although a CDROM is available that sysinstall must
> run from the floppy.

CD booting is a BIOS function. If your BIOS will not boot the FreeBSD CDs
then you must use floppies.  Any system that was certified for the Windows
NT logo program should support it, which is pretty much every system built
since the mid-1990s. The only times I've had problems is when the BIOS was
not set up to search the CDROM in the boot order.

> Of course, this is further complicated since the file "boot.flp" on the
> floppies directory is 2.8 meg much larger than a floppy can hold.  Which of
> course contradicts the web page instructions on using "fdimage" to make a
> boot floppy in the first place.

The instructions also say to use kern.flp and mfsroot.flp for your disk
images. boot.flp is only if you have a 2.88MB floppy drive (very, very
rare) or are booting off of CD as it is the El Torito boot image.  On 5.X,
we boot CDs directly, and don't even need that image.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite at gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org