Problem installing FreeBSD 5.3

[Roland Smith]

On Tue, Jul 03, 2007 at 02:10:24PM -0400, Lisa Casey wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am attempting to install FreeBSD 5.3 (because that's the latest distro I 
> have CD's for) on a brand new system with a 80 G harddrive and 2 G RAM.

Since 5.3 is no supported anymore, I suggest that you download 6.2 images.
 
> I boot from Disk 1 of the 5.3 disk set and choose to begin a standard 
> installation. Next is the fdisk utility to partition the drive. The first 
> thing  I get is a message which states:
> 
> WARNING: A geometry of 155061/16/63 for ad0 is incorrect. Using a more 
> likely geometry. If this geometry is incorrect or if you are unsure whether 
> or not it's correct, please consult the hardware guide in the documentation 
> submenu or use the (G)eometry command to change it now.

I've ignored this every time I saw it without adverse results.

> I can choose OK and get past this.  I choose to devote the entire disk to 
> FreeBSD, and install the FreeBSD boot manager. Next I need to partition my 
> drive. The defaults won't do at all (this machine  is to be a radius server 
> & mail server and the default size of /var is too small). I chose 2000M for 
> /, 4000M for swap (using 2 x RAM), 200M for /tmp, 20,000M for /usr and the 
> remainder for /var.

2000M for / is quite a lot. On my system, root gets 200M. It only uses
about 90M currently.
 
> Unable to find device node for /dev/ad0s1b in /dev. The creation of file 
> systems will be aborted.
> 
> ad0s1b is my swap partition. I changed the size of swap to 2000M thinking 
> perhaps it was too large but I get the same error about unable to find 
> device node.....
> 
> I've googled this but haven't found anything that helped me resolve this. 
> Any body on this list know what I need to do to get FreeBSD installed on 
> this drive?

If it still fails the same way with 6.2, I'd submit a problem report.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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