*BSD News Article 44963


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From: imgidata@netcom.com (Robert Fagen)
Subject: Kernel Recompiling... Again
Message-ID: <imgidataD9oq4q.18y@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
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Date: Mon, 5 Jun 1995 05:34:02 GMT
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Sender: imgidata@netcom8.netcom.com

A while back I posted a query about "Invalid format!" messages at boot
time from trying to load a PPP enabled kernel. I've since looked into
the source code and discovered the following things:

  1. I found that "Invalid format!" is a response to the kernel
     having an invalid magic number. I looked in the kernel that
     I'm trying to boot, and the magic number was identical to the
     default kernel.

  2. In utter frustration, I reinstalled from scratch. From the
     response to my prior question, I attempted to work around what
     may be a hardware problem by changing from:

     Partition Cyl Start  Size   Type   Mount
     a         0          25 Mb  newfs  /
     b         3000-ish   32 Mb  swap   swap
     c                                  FreeBSD slice
     d                                  Entire Disk
     e         6000-ish   435Mb  newfs  /usr

     to:

     Partition Cyl Start  Size   Type   Mount
     a         4000-ish   25 Mb  newfs  /
     b         0          32 Mb  swap   swap
     c                                  FreeBSD slice
     d                                  Entire Disk
     e         6000-ish   435Mb  newfs  /usr

     and that resulted in not being able to find *any* kernel. If I
     typed '?' at the boot prompt, I got ". .." as the entire result.

     I also tried:

     Partition Cyl Start  Size   Type   Mount
     a         4000-ish   460Mb  newfs  /
     b         0          32 Mb  swap   swap
     c                                  FreeBSD slice
     d                                  Entire Disk

     and that didn't work either.


  3. I went back to the original partitions, and immediately after
     installing, I made a copy of 'kernel', set the same permissions
     and did a chflags (per the 'make install' steps). When rebooting,
     I got the 'Invalid format!' message for the kernel copy, and the
     original kernel booted fine.

Help!

TIA,

Rob
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