I am writing this after reading two responses, both of which I am grateful
for. I should have included this info in the original posting but better
late than never, I guess.
There have been two suggestions both very related, both of which I have
already considered. I thought perhaps my BIOS required a DOS partition so
I installed RedHat 6.1 to be sure. Guess what? It worked!
Nevertheless, I installed a 2Meg DOS partition and set it to active before
re-isntalling 3.3-R. OH, and yes, I also set my freeBSD partition to
active as well... every time! But even this did not work.
Does this mean I have everyone stumped? ;-)
Marwan
On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Thierry Herbelot wrote:
> Hello
>
> [-mobile trimmed]
>
> Marwan Fayed wrote:
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > I am a seasoned UNIX user but have been using freebsd for only about 6
> > months. I have posted this problem to freebsd-questions with no response
> > so, figuring it must be a bug in the install program i'm going to try
> > here. Oh, I would like to have traced the code to try to find the bug (if
> > one exists) but being a senior year undergrad with a full course load and
> > thesis, I have been left with little time... please forgive me.
> >
> > My problem is this. I am trying to install 3.3-R on an IBM Thinkpad 365XD
> > (although I have received mail from a man in France who is having the same
> > problem on a desktop). The installation runs completely smoothly but when
> > I finish and reboot the machine reports no resident O.S.
>
> This may be due to a faulty BIOS : some BIOSes do not like at all not
> having a DOS partition at the beginning of the disk (I have some HP PCs
> with just 20 Megs of FAT at the start of the disk to keep them booting -
> from <F2>, which is FreeBSD)
>
> >
> > After trying many different things (including messing with the MBR, double
> > and triple checking disk geometry, and using a Fixit disk to try to
> > diagnose the problem), I booted from the install floppy to the main
> > install menu. Rather than re-install all over again for the nth time I
> > just entered the label editor. The partitions were still there but the
> > mount points were lost. What appeared was
> > this:
> >
> > <none> 40M // supposed to be root
> > swap 84M // swap is obviously OK
> > <none> 651M // supposed to be /usr
>
> The mount points for each partition are recorded in /etc/fstab : what
> you are seeing is completely normal, as sysinstall has not read the
> fstab file from the root partition of your disk.
>
> >
> > This is clearly not what I designated so I tried relabelling the mount
> > points, writing the information using 'w' and exiting install only to have
> > the BIOS report no O.S. yet again!
>
> Try and leave a small DOS partition at the beginning of your disk, as
> said above.
>
> >
> > The machine is a P100,40M ram,810HD, standard PCI (as far as I have been
> > able to tell/test). Has anyone encountered this or know the problem?
> >
> > Thanks a TON!
> >
> > Marwan :-)
>
> TfH
>
> >
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>
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