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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!bruce.cs.monash.edu.au!monu6!minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au!kjb From: kjb@cgl.citri.edu.au (Kendall Bennett) Subject: 386BSD - Seems to stop my disks from booting... Organization: RMIT Advanced Computer Graphics Centre, CITRI, Melbourne Date: 12 Sep 92 08:32:50 GMT Message-ID: <kjb.716286770@godzilla.cgl.citri.edu.au> Sender: usenet@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au (Njuiz noveles nova newes) Lines: 46 I am trying to install 386 BSD on my system. I have a 486/33 system with 8M ram, and two 120M Western Digitial 2120 hard disks (WDC AC2120M). Currently I have OS/2 2.0 install on my system, and was hoping to get them working side by side (using the boot manager). Originally I was going to have OS/2 2.0 on one disk, and 386 BSD on the other, changing disks simply by flicking a switch which changes the master slave relationship between the two drives (IDE drives). This worked fine when I tested it for MSDOS 5.0, but after I installed 386 BSD on the entire disk, it simply would not boot (machine hung and the A: drive sat a whirred - even Ctrl-Alt-Del did not work). I could still boot from the first drive as per normal. Then I removed everything BUT the drive that I was installing 386 BSD on, and tried again but to no avail (running the OS/2 2.0 Fdisk showed the disk as being free, but Tiny386BSD could still recognise and even mount the drive properly). Now for the strange part. After deciding something was wrong :-), I installed MSDOS 5.0 onto the disk (thinking that the HPFS format could be confusing 386BSD), but now MSDOS wont boot either! ARRRGHH! I low level re-formatted the drive (from the BIOS setup - don't know if this actually does anything for IDE drives), but it still does not boot. Finally I decided that maybe something was wrong with my second drive, so I reformatted it as an OS/2 2.0 installable file system and transferred all of my OS/2 stuff over to it (OS/2 unlike others can boot from the second drive!), so I would then have a 1 Mb boot manage partition, 4Mb MSDOS partition and a 114Mb 386BSD partition. I installed 386BSD on the disk, rebooted and guess what - the stupid machine did excatly the same thing - it wouldn't boot. By now I was real worried about not having a single hard disk that would boot, so I booted up OS/2 2.0 from floppies, and ran fdisk. Fdisk now found a partition marked as A5, so I added it to the boot manage menu. Rebooting and up came boot manage - selected 386BSD and boom - machine did a hardware reset! Damn. I also worked out that if I do a shutdown -to386bsd, it puts the system back into the non-bootable state, and a shutdown -todos makes MSDOS startable again, but I have to load OS/2 2.0 from floppies to get boot manage to work again (using fdisk). My system has an AMI BIOS (latest 7/7/91 release) with an ETEQ chipset. I also have a MegaEVA/2 ET4000 based video card with HiColor RamDac installed. Any clues pppplllleaaasssse?