I'm trying to get my first FreeBSD (4.8-RELEASE) installation working, and I am having trouble getting a system which boots, primarily due to what appear to be disk geometry issues (but this is a complete newbie guess).
The hardware: Gigabyte GA-6BXC motherboard <http://tw.giga-byte.com/motherboard/products/products_ga-6bxc.htm> (BIOS V.F4c <http://tw.giga-byte.com/motherboard/support/bios/BIOS_GA-6BXC.htm>) Celeron 366 448 MB RAM Seagate ST380011A 80GB HDD <http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/marketing/detail/0,1081,581,00.html> Mitsumi CD-ROM FX320S Delta CD-Writer No FDD AcerLAN ALN-325 10/100 PCI Ethernet Adapter (Realtek 8139 chipset) Creative Soundblaster SB16 CT2960 ISA sound card Diamond Viper 330 AGP HP 4033B monitor My first attempt at installing FreeBSD (using the bootable CDROM images for 4.8-RELEASE) was rewarded with "Missing Operating System" on next boot. FreeBSD guesses the geometry as being 155061/16/63, which it then discards as incorrect (the first time through the install I accepted its assumed geometry of 9729/255/63). The BIOS CMOS is configured to "Auto" detect the drives on boot, if I change it to "User" it defaults to 38307/16/255 - but sysinstall/fdisk rejects this geometry outright. Next, I created a NTFS partition on the drive with an XP install CD, and then booted from the FreeBSD install CDs with -v, and got the following output: BIOS Geometries: 0:03fe0f3f 0..1022=1023 cylinders, 0..15=16 heads, 1..63=63 sectors 0 accounted for Device configuration finished ... Creating DISK ad0 ar: FreeBSD check1 failed ad0: <ST380011A/3.06> ATA-6 disk at ata0-master ad0: 76319MB (156301488 sectors), 155061 C, 16H, 63S, 512B ad0: piomode=4 dmamode=2 udmamode=5 cblid=1 ata1-master: piomode=4 dmamode=2 udmamode=4 dmaflag=1 ata1-master: success setting PIO4 on generic chip So I tried installing with 1023/16/63. Still the "Missing Operating System" error. Out of other ideas, I resorted to "Dangerous Dedicated", which at least gave a different error: No /boot/loader >> FreeBSD/i386 BOOT Default: 0:ad(0,a)/kernel boot: No /kernel A bit of googling suggested 0:ad(0,c)/kernel as an alternative boot command, but it had no greater success for my case. So other suggestions would be appreciated! As my plan is to use the machine as a dedicated server, "Dangeously Dedicated" is not an issue for me, as long this won't be a problem for future FreeBSD releases...? It's also worth noting that I upgraded the BIOS to v.F4c as the system would not boot with the ST380011A connected (BIOS hung trying to display the drive size). Interestingly the release notes state "Support 75GB HDD", rather than 75GB+... Particularly since the FreeBSD sysinstall partitioning/slice tool reports the drive size as 76319MB (less than 75GB), even though it is meant to be an 80GB drive. BTW, when installing/configuring XFree86 I selected "nv RIVA 128" as my video card, as this seemed the closest to the Viper 330 (given I understand it uses the Riva 128 chipset). Is this the right selection? If I try and run the graphical X-windows configuration tool it fails, so I set the above through the curses interface... Fare thee well, Sean. _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
