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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.mel.connect.com.au!news.mira.net.au!news.vbc.net!samba.rahul.net!rahul.net!a2i!olivea!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!howland.erols.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!news.alt.net!newspost1.alt.net!usenet From: "S." <sdbrown@artsci.wustl.edu> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Installation CD difficulty Date: Fri, 13 Sep 1996 21:08:52 -0500 Organization: Altopia Corp. - Affordable Usenet Access - http://www.alt.net Lines: 43 Message-ID: <323A13B0.71FC@artsci.wustl.edu> Reply-To: sdb3@cec.wustl.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (Win95; I) I'm running into problems installing FreeBSD off of CD. The installation program chugs along fine until it gets to pulling the bin distribution off of the CD... it reads about 7% of the disk and then the transfer suddenly bogs down, pausing several seconds between reads. Several minutes later, usually, (it's not consistent,) it will report a bug: -1 bytes read of 1024, followed by unable to read from wcd0. Allowed to continue, the installation program continues without further difficulty, until it gets to the manpages section of the distribution, where it craps out much later (percentagewise... the actual number of bits transfered may be the same...) in the transfer. The bug repeats again in the dict transfer. manpages and dictionaries i may be able to do without, and shouldn't have a problem patching in later, but obviously, the system won't run without the binaries. The installation program seems to identify my hard disk geometry adequetly (even tho i've given it the whole, disk, so that shouldn't be a problem.) and i've tried booting from both the standard and (russian) atapi boot disks. (Having not built the computer myself, i'm not clear on what all of the components are, nor do i have an OSless diagnostic sitting around...) When i recieved the computer, it was running dos 6.2 and windows 3.11 without evident problem. It should have adequete horsepower for the task, being a 486-66 w/ 16 megs of memory if i recall. I failed earlier to install FreeBSD off of floppies (having followed the installation instructions so best i could, i was geated with the "cannot find bin docs manpages dict (etc..)" error message. Later, after having failed to install FreeBSD from the CD with many variations on methodology, i tried installing NT Server, just to see if it wasn't a hardware error. That installation went fine (identifying my CD drive as Atapi 1.2, interestingly enough) until it tried to format the hard drive, halting progress at 99% while the drive chugged away endlessly. I should mention, NT misidentified the drive as being 611 megs. (it actually being 620... is it just shaving off the 9 megs that will be lost to formatting in advance?) Errors i have noticed in the FreeBSD boot sequence include misidentification of the drive geometry (this is corrected later in the install process automatically) and an Atapi phase error, (i forget the exact wording.) both when using the standard & atapi boot disks. So, good doctors, what's the prognosis? Awaiting eagerly, S. p.s. please respond to the newsgroup. i am presently cut off from my mailserver, strangely enough.