*BSD News Article 11757


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From: james@sol1.east-london.ac.uk (James Andrews, User Support)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: trouble setting up 386bsd on 40meg ide
Date: 23 Feb 1993 13:14:43 -0600
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We are trying to set up 386bsd on three Anhkter pc clones, 486dx-33 with
8mb of RAM and western digital ethernet cards.
Without the hard disks fitted they boot off the Tiny 386bsd boot floppy,
but with a hard disk in them they hang when the boot floppy gets to "changing
root device to fd0".  This is with the CMOS disk number at 17 ( which is 
correct, we phoned western digital ).  Before it gets to this it generates
an error message when looking at the hard disk:

wd0:<DW9 0344A-(4 0BM) >1:<wdgetctlr failed, assuming OK> at 0x1f0 irq 14 on
isa.

The only way to make them boot with a disk in is to alter the CMOS ram settings
to make the system believe that there is no disk fitted.  It then boots
normally and finds the wd0 device on irq 14- but install doesnt work as the
newfs fails in this case and it seems to imply that newfs has no idea how
big the disk is- the message is something like "cant seek to 21354625436" or
some similarly large number.

This weird behaviour cant be entirely due to small size of the disk as I have
already installed 386bsd on a 40mb 386sx by installing all it could from the
distrubution disks in /tmp watching all the "disk full" messages fly by and
then nfs mounting a copy of the bindist over /tmp after it scrubs on the first
flakey reboot.  The real size of 386bsd if you can ignore the size of the
/tmp dist disks seems to be about 32 meg.
Perhaps the small disk size is causing some confusion though ( I'm just guess
ing here )

james@sol1.uel.ac.uk