*BSD News Article 2702


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
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From: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de (Holger Veit)
Subject: Re: 386BSD-0.1 Install problem: can't relabel disk, etc...
References: <1992Jul28.200625.11771@donau.et.tudelft.nl>
Date: 29 Jul 92 08:31:12 GMT
Reply-To: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de
Organization: Uni-Duisburg FB9 Datenverarbeitung
Keywords: 386bsd
Sender: @unidui.uni-duisburg.de
Message-ID: <veit.712398672@du9ds3>
Lines: 78

In <1992Jul28.200625.11771@donau.et.tudelft.nl> franky@duteca.et.tudelft.nl (Frank W. ten Wolde) writes:

>I'm having trouble installing 386BSD-0.1 to my system.

[...]

>When I prepare a partition of type A5 on my disk and try to install again
>(install -debug) I get:

>	 bios finds: cyl 1001 heads 15 sectors 17
>	Partitions:
>	offset	size	type	flag
>	17	153748	a5	0
>	153765	101235	81	0
>	0	0	0	0
>	0	0	0	0
>	Do you want to install <...> disk drive's 386BSD partition? (y/n) y
>	making root size 143055 offset 17
>	making swap size 10000 offset 143265
>	label written at sector 17
>	High level formatting of 386 BSD disk storage:
>	...
>	...
>	super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
>	32, ...
>	...
>	...
>	...					, 134704, 138816
>	newfs: ioctl (WDINFO): No such process
>	newfs: /dev/rwd0a: can't rewrite disk label

>and the installation fails again.
>Can someone please explain? I also tries the fixit.fs boot floppy and
>used disklabel. Then I get errors about not being able to find/write the
>disk label and I get '/dev/rwd0a: invalid argument' errors.

This should be in the FAQ (but is not yet :-(
Your listing shows that you A5 partition does not start at a cylinder boundary.
It starts at head 1, cylinder 0, sector 1 according to your disk parameters.
This happens as a "feature" when you prepare the partition by FDISK and 
change the ID to A5 then. 
NEWFS does not like to start at a non-cylinder boundary and does not find the
location to store the disk label. I think this is not a bug, but a vital
feature, so don't patch the newfs source to get the remaining 238 sectors
(they won't save your life).

Change the offset to 15*17 = 255 and adjust the size accordingly (subtract
255-17). Install should work then.

>My system is:	386/33 (unknown chipset)
>		4 Mb core
>		no NCP
>		ST1144AT	(drive 1: 125Mb)
>		ST251AT		(drive 2: 43Mb)
>		SC499		(tape controller)

I am not sure about your tape controller, but the rest is not critical.

>	
>Thanks!

>-Frank ten Wolde

>--
>#############################################################################
># Frank W. ten Wolde (PA3FMT)    | E-mail: franky@duteca.et.tudelft.nl
># Delft University of Technology |
># The Netherlands                |

Hope that helps

Holger

-- 
|  |   / Holger Veit             | INTERNET: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de
|__|  /  University of Duisburg  | BITNET: veit%du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de@UNIDO
|  | /   Dept. of Electr. Eng.   | "No, my programs are not BUGGY, these are
|  |/    Inst. f. Dataprocessing |          just unexpected FEATURES"