Re: Dell PowerEdge1850 Won't Take a Freebsd4.11 Installation.
A Dell PowerEdge1850 will, in fact take a FreeBSD4.11 installation. This problem has been solved. It turns out that Dell Computers only supports a particular version of Redhat at this time. They put a special partition on the drives shipped with PowerEdge 1850's that is about 50 MB which is some sort of diagnostic tool they use. It has the side effect of absolutely trashing many other Linux distributions and FreeBSD4.11, possibly FreeBSD5.4, also although we didn't try it. For some reason, the fdisk utility on a Windows98 boot disk is Draconian enough to blow away the special partition and then everything works like normal. Thanks to those who had helpful suggestions. It turned out not to be FreeBSD's fault at all. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Dell PowerEdge1850 Won't Take a Freebsd4.11 Installation.
Martin McCormick [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I just powered up a shiny new Dell Poweredge 1850 with the idea of installing FreeBSD4.11 on it. Everything started out okay until I got to the part in the Standard Installation where it was going to extract the distributions just after formatting the disk, actually the hardware raid disks. At that point, every single distribution prompted the message that roughly goes: User Information. Unable to extract blablabla from acd0. So far, game over. A 750 server which also has a RAID controller is, so far, taking the installation perfectly. The CDROM drive works well enough to boot and the boot process looks right until I try to extract the distributions such as /bin, etc. Are there any other things to investigate before saying that 4.11 and Dell 1850's don't get along? Well, I'd certainly expect 5.4 or later, with the ATA and RAID improvements, to work better, but you're right that it kind of sounds more like the CD is giving you the problems. Check the emergency shell (alt-F4, I think?) for any messages... ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Dell PowerEdge1850 Won't Take a Freebsd4.11 Installation.
Lowell Gilbert writes: Well, I'd certainly expect 5.4 or later, with the ATA and RAID improvements, to work better, but you're right that it kind of sounds more like the CD is giving you the problems. Check the emergency shell (alt-F4, I think?) for any messages... Thank you very much. I have downloaded the iso images for 5.4 that I need to get started: 5.4-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso 5.4-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso 5.4-RELEASE-i386-disc2.iso and discovered another surprise. There appears to be no headless option as in boot -h although I may have missed it. A google search turned up a pretty good article on how to make a headless boot.flp floppy for 5.4. Is there any way to make the standard boot CD come up on a serial port? The instructions for making the boot.flp image assume you already have FreeBSD5.4 installed somewhere which I don't yet have. I did see a bootsio file on the bootonly CD so that looks like a possibility. As a computer user who happens to be blind, the ability to do a cold start from a serial port, preferably from the boot/installation cd saves lots of time and tinkering. Most of us are in this business because we love to tinker, but sometimes there is a job to be done and the faster it gets done, the better. Thanks again. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
