Hi all,

please point me to the right list if this isn't the right one, but I'm
running into what appears to be GEOM trouble when installing 5.0-RELEASE.

[btw, the below uses MSDOS terminology for partitions, sorry]

The setup is a fairly straight athlon 700 with IDE 2 harddisks, a primary
master of 13 G and primary slave of 6 G.

BIOS detects both fine, I have Windows XP installed in the first primary
partion of ad0, and an extra FAT logical partition in the
extended partion on the same drive, resulting in ad0s1, ad0s2 and ad0s5.
This disk is fine.

The other however, is not. I first tried to install FreeBSD when I still had a
primary FAT partition with Win98 on it. Booting from floppy & doing an FTP
install went fine, but on reboot, the kernel couldn't mount the root
partition. Even worse, after rebooting in XP, it turned out that my Win98
partition was unrecognizable (fortunately nothing was lost).

I thought it might be due to my 'unusual' (for me) setup of having 2
primary partitions, 1 win98 and 1 BSD, so I tried again, this time
allocating the whole 6 G disk to BSD. Retried the install, once again
went fine until the reboot, when the kernel still couldn't find the
root partition. Handtyping ad1s1 didn't work, ad1 wasn't listed in
the boot devices list, no go.

I booted from floppy once again and tried the fixit floppy. And I think
I found out where the problem was (forgive any typos, this is transcribed
as I don't have a serial console):

Fixit# ls -l /dev/ad*
crw-r-----  1 root  operator    4,   4 Mar  3 20:07 /dev/ad0
crw-r-----  1 root  operator    4,   5 Mar  3 20:07 /dev/ad0s1
crw-r-----  1 root  operator    4,   6 Mar  3 20:07 /dev/ad0s2
crw-r-----  1 root  operator    4,   8 Mar  3 20:07 /dev/ad0s5
crw-r-----  1 root  operator    4,   7 Mar  3 20:07 /dev/ad1

There is no ad1s1 device! No wonder the kernel can't find it's root
if it doesn't detect the correct partition. Am I doing something wrong
here?

Unfortunately I'm not able to get at sysctl output so I can't find GEOM
debugging output there. Is there any way I can provide more information
on this? Has anyone else run into this?

--Stijn

-- 
Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already
know dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be
killed.
                -- G.K. Chesterton

Attachment: pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Reply via email to