FreeBSD 4.9: Installation: CD-ROM problems

[Keith Kelly]

I bought longer ATA/133 cables and reconfigured the wiring of my IDE 
devices.  The mid-cable connector supposedly should go to the slave device, 
according to the labels on the cables.  So now the wiring arrangement is 
consistent with how the devices are jumpered.
Still, sysinstall is unable to mount any CDs.  I do notice that when the 
kernal load while booting from the CD, it detects all 5 of my disk devices.

Anyone else want to take a stab at this? One user's choice of whether to 
love or hate FreeBSD hangs in the balance...

- Keith

----- Original Message ----- 
From: fbsd_user

Good job of doing your homework. Lets continue on with the intent of
the FAQ you quoted. Are your HD jumpered as master and slave or are
they jumpered as CS for cable select?  The 2 nipples on the IDE
ribbon have predefined meanings as to which one is the master nipple
and which one is the slave nipple.

Jumpering your IDE drives to  CS  uses the predefined meanings of
the nipples. I have always jumpered my IDE devices as master or
slave and plug them into the correct ribbon nipple.  Check it out,
and post your results.

-----Original Message-----
From: c0d3h4x0r at hotmail.com <Keith Kelly>
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 12:25 AM
To: freebsd-questions at FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: FreeBSD 4.9: Installation: CD-ROM problems

>From the FreeBSD FAQ 
(http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/install.html#NO-INSTALL-CDROM):
------------------
3.16. I booted from my ATAPI CDROM, but the install program says no
CDROM is found. Where did it go?

The usual cause of this problem is a mis-configured CDROM drive.
Many PCs now ship with the CDROM as the slave device on the
secondary IDE controller, with no master device on that controller.
This is illegal according to the ATAPI specification, but Windows
plays fast and loose with the specification, and the BIOS ignores it
when booting. This is why the BIOS was able to see the CDROM to boot
from it, but why FreeBSD cannot see it to complete the install.

Reconfigure your system so that the CDROM is either the master
device on the IDE controller it is attached to, or make sure that it
is the slave on an IDE controller that also has a master device.
-------------------

Well, I'm hitting exactly this problem with the install program
after booting off the CD, but in my case the CDROM *is* the slave
device on an IDE controller that also has a master device!  My
configuration is as follows:

 - IDE1 master: hard drive
 - IDE1 slave: hard drive
 - IDE2 master: hard drive
 - IDE2 slave: CD-ROM drive

I'm a long-time Windows user who has dabbled in Linux and hated a
lot about it.  After reading about FreeBSD, I'm really excited to
install it and try it out.  But I can't even get into the
installation process because of this issue.

Can anyone help?  I've searched newsgroup and e-mail list archives
and have found nothing relevant.

- Keith