*BSD News Article 83549


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From: Andr‚ Coetzee <acoetzee@ctcc.gov.za>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: 2.1.5R Installation problem
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1996 08:21:55 -0800
Organization: Cape Town City Council
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Hello again,

I have recently bought a new PC: Cyrix P150+; 32Mb RAM; 2 Gig IDE Hdd.

I am battling to install FreeBSD on the new machine, yet it works perfectly on the old
machine, a 486DX50 with 8 Mb and two HDDs (105Mb IDE and a 340 Mb SCSI).

I am trying to install from a DOS 6.22 partition. The BIOS is looking at a geometry of 
1023 cyl and 64 heads (63 Sectors of 512 bytes per track) for the 2 gig drive.

The autodetection for wd0 reports a geometry of 4092 cyl and 16 heads (63 x 512). 
However, the geometry does match the BIOS for the FreeBSD partition.

The installation creates its newfs partitions, and fails during the unpacking of the 
distribution files. It reports that it failed doing a write, and that -1 of 1024 bytes 
were written. This only seems to happen after a good few thousand bytes are already 
written.

Am I overlooking something?

If I can't fix it, is there a way to restore my DOS partition to 2 gig without backing 
up and reformatting?

I notice on the other machine, the disk drives are far busier during disk operations in 
FreeBSD than in DOS. Does FreeBSD offer some form of disk caching or is there a utility 
available for this?

Many Thanks

PLEASE post replies to my E-MAIL address: acoetzee@ctcc.gov.za