*BSD News Article 46368


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From: wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu (Bill Paul)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Unable to install from CD
Date: 4 Jul 1995 16:59:57 GMT
Organization: Columbia University Center for Telecommunications Research
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Daring to challenge the will of the almighty Leviam00se, David Moore
(euromall@internet-eireann.ie) had the courage to say:

: HELP

: sd(1,a) was I thought the most wonderful thing I had ever seen after
: spending hours trying to get past 'unable to mount root'.
: The install notes seem to have let me down again.
: Now that I am on the hard drive to continue with the installation I
: choose CD-Rom. The notes say I will now be prompted for the
: 'installation subdirectory'.
: I'm not. It asks for type of CD, I choose mitsumi and it tells me
: 'unable to mount /dev/mcd0a /mnt' (thats from memory).

: The CD is a quad speed IDE the manual says the interface is 
: IDE ATAPI 1.2 (SFF 8020)

Bzzzzzt!! Sorry, this should be documented somewhere; ATAPI
CD-ROM drives are not supported in 2.0.5. There's a chance they
might be in 2.1. The only Mitsumi drives that are currently
supported are those that use the proprietary Mitsumi interface,
which is not the same as ATAPI.

: The machine is a gateway 2000 dx2 66 with two western digital caviar
: 540mb hard disks and quad speed CD Rom.

Yeah yeah, I know, I know. Gateway loves to sell people machines
with these crummy drives. If you can guilt them into letting you
exchange it for a SCSI drive, do it. If they won't do it, complain
loudly anyway. Maybe some day they'll get the point.

: Can someone please help me out.

: David.

Your only recourse is to boot the machine into DOS and copy the
tarballs off the CD onto some other supported media. If you have
an MS-DOS partition on this machine (i.e. you're running both
DOS and FreeBSD on the same box), then you can copy the files
into a subdirectory on your DOS partition, reboot into FreeBSD
and them mount the DOS partition. (Be careful to preserve the
filesystem structure as it appears on the CD; make a top level
FREEBSD directory, then make a BIN directory for the bin.??
files, an SRC directory for the sources, etc...)

If you don't have a DOS partition available, your only other
option is to copy the files onto DOS floppies and do a floppy
install.

(You could also install from tape, but you didn't say you had a
tape drive, so...)

Sorry, but dems da breaks. Hopefully the support for these
drives won't be long in coming; these drives are becoming
annoyingly popular.

-Bill

--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~T~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
-Bill Paul            (212) 854-6020 | System Manager
Work:         wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu | Center for Telecommunications Research
Home:  wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu | Columbia University, New York City
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