*BSD News Article 26686


Return to BSD News archive

Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!decwrl!decwrl!usenet.coe.montana.edu!bsd.coe.montana.edu!nate
From: nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Nate Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: FreeBSD with MFM disks?
Date: 30 Jan 1994 02:45:32 GMT
Organization: Montana State University - Bozeman MT
Lines: 42
Message-ID: <2if70c$pv8@pdq.coe.montana.edu>
References: <13069@blue.cis.pitt.edu> <2i90cc$ekt@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <wilko.759747597@spoetnix.idca.tds.philips.nl> <13328@blue.cis.pitt.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: bsd.coe.montana.edu

In article <13328@blue.cis.pitt.edu>, Jerome A Marella <mopar+@pitt.edu> wrote:
>In article <wilko.759747597@spoetnix.idca.tds.philips.nl> wilko@idca.tds.philips.nl (Wilko Bulte) writes:
>>nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Nate Williams) writes:
>>
>>>In article <13069@blue.cis.pitt.edu>, Jerome A Marella <mopar+@pitt.edu> wrote:
>>>> Anyway while trying to install FreeBSD last night everything
>>>> was going fine until it started to make the root filesystem on the 
>>>> disk (Maxtor). It didn't give any errors other the the no disk label error.

>Yes, I was hasty in my post after getting frustrated when it didn't install.
>Hopefully I won't do that again....
>
>It complained that there was no label on the disk and didn't make the
>filesystem. When it tried to mount the root filesystem, it complained that the
>superblock was bad. So I assume it never made the filesystem.

The stock wd driver released in FreeBSD 1.0 has problems with certain disks.
That is the reason for the kc-altwd-floppy.  That driver has been improved
greatly and is now the default driver in FreeBSD.  (I've got a ton more
fixes from the main author sitting in my TODO directory that need to
be tested for the FreeBSD 1.1 release now, and that's after we proven
the current driver to be more stable than the driver released in 1.0)

>I had to rewrite the fs disk after every time it failed. If I didn't it would
>not mount the floppy the next time I tried to use it.

That sounds like hardware problems, especially considering the below.

>I noticed that a lot of the time the fs floppy was mounted read-only for some
>reason. I used both 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" disks and I know how to tell if they are
>write enabled.

If you don't need to write to the disk, why mount it read/write for safety
reasons?  Also, how could the disks get corrupted if they were read-only?


Nate
-- 
nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu     |  FreeBSD core member and all around tech
nate@cs.montana.edu          |  weenie.
work #: (406) 994-4836       |  Graduating May '94 with a BS in EE 
home #: (406) 586-0579       |  - looking for work in CS/EE field.