help installing FreeBSD

David Stanford dthomas53 at gmail.com
Thu Jul 27 14:53:54 UTC 2006


> I'm sorry, I think I didn't explain it very well...
> When I choose the media type, a message is shown warning that '...this is
> the last chance... we can take no responsabillity". I hit 'ok' and then a
> message appears saying 'writing partitions...' and a few seconds later
> appears one message saying  'Unable to make new root filesystem on
> /dev/ad0s1a! Command returned status 36' (sometimes the 'Command returned
> status 1'). I hit 'ok' and then appears: 'Couldn't make filesystems
> properly. Aborting'. And finally the last message I receive is 'Instalation
> completed with some errors. You may wish to scroll through...' At this point
> is where I press Alt+F2 and the errors (the WRITE_DMA errors) are shown. Is
> not necessary to press Alt+F2 but I read it somewhere. I hope you know now
> where do these errors are shown, if not please respond me again and I'll try
> to explain it better.
> By the way, I don't think is the checksum because I was trying to install
> FreeBSD 5.4 at first and the same error occured, but I will check the
> checksum, is just that... excuse my ignorance, but what is the checksum of
> my ISO image and how do I verify it???? Sorry I know that is a stupid
> question...
>

As somebody already mentioned, it could very well be an issue with your hard
drive - but the simplest thing to do is first verify that your ISO and,
thus, your CDROM image aren't corrupt. A checksum is basically a value
generated from a data file using some sort of calculation method (in this
case, using an md5 hash). This value can then be later used to verify
nothing has changed in the data
file and that you have downloaded it with no errors. This is a common
thing to see in the open source world. If you want more information on
this, more can be found from
wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checksum>
. If you are downloading on a Windows machine, you can use the md5sum
utility (download
here <http://www.etree.org/md5com.html>
). Once you have the ISO file, you can simpy place both the md5sum.exe
 utility and ISO in the same directory and run it like so:

C:\Documents and Settings\dstanford\Desktop>*md5sum.exe
6.1-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso*

This will generate a value which you can then compare with what the
valueshould be,
here<ftp://ftp1.us.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/ISO-IMAGES/6.1/CHECKSUM.MD5>.
If the two values match up, then you know the downloaded file (ISO) is the
same as the one on the server and that there were no errors while
downloading.

Good luck!

-David
-- 
[root at fbsd ~]# fortune
Happiness is just an illusion, filled with sadness and confusion.


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