Is the installer for freeBSD 4.5 broken? I've long procrastinated updating to a more recent version of freeBSD, mainly because I hate trying to get things back the way I had them afterwards.
Consequently, I've been running 3.4 for quite a long while. Today, I finally decided to bite the bullet and update to 4.5, the most recent CD that I have. Actually, "update" is the wrong word, I suppose. What I had planned to do is simply to install it on another disk that I have in my system. First a summary of my system (I'll append details at the end) even though this is a system that has been running freeBSD for years. I'm running an Intel D845WN m'board with 2.4GHz Pentium 4 and 512MB of RAM. I have two SCSI cards, my original Adaptec 2940 and a TekRam DC390U2W (I think that's right). On the 2940 I have my CDROM drive and the three disk drives; a fourth drive is on the TekRam. My plan was to install 4.5 on that fourth drive. Why? See next paragraph. In the past, when I've gone to a newer version, what I've done is to keep the older version on one disk and install the newer on another. That way I could boot to either until I got the new system the way I wanted it. Consequently, on the first of the four disks (da0s2), a 2GB IBM, is leftovers from freeBSD 2.1.5 as well as a defunct W95 slice (da0s1). On the second, a 4GB Seagate, is freeBSD 3.4. The third disk a 9GB Seagate is /home and nothing else. The fourth disk, an 18GB Seagate, was slated for a recent version of freeBSD. I'd planned to install 4.5 on that disk so that I could also continue to boot to 3.4 until I have 4.5 set up to my satisfaction. I've seen nothing that says that freeBSD can't handle more than a couple of disk drives nor that the installer cannot. But that is my experience today. I should have gone quail hunting as I'd originally planned. :( Here's what happened: In the past I've never had a problem booting from the CDROMs but the Intel m'board is a replacement for a previous board that died. The first misadventure was that I couldn't get it to boot from the CDROM although the (SCSI BIOS, I think) boot messages recognize that a bootable CDROM was in the drive. I should have known there that it was going to be one of those days... Giving up on that, I dd'ed the floppy images to a couple of floppies and booted from them. The real problem occurred when I got to the "FreeBSD Disklabel Editor" screen. To get there, I'd gone through the fdisk stuff with all four disks. With the first three, simply going into the fdisk screen and immediately entering "q" and then accepting the "install boot manager" option for it. With the fourth disk, I created a maximum freeBSD slice leaving room for the boot manager. Fine so far. On to the disklabel screen: There I found that all four disks were listed at the top of the screen and the information about them seemed to be correct. In the middle of the screen was a list of (Unix) partitions for da0 and da1. Thinking that, as I progressed through them either I could select the other two disk from the top or, as I worked through to the end of those visibly listed, I proceeded to provide mount points for the existing disks. When I had done for the last partition in the list, it didn't proceed to another partition; it jumped back to the first of those I'd already gone through. Going to the top of the page didn't do any good either. Highlighting the line for da2 and hitting <ENTER> simply took me to the line for da3 and hitting <ENTER> there took me back to the first partition in the list that I'd already provided mount points for. Nothing I could think to try allowed me to provide a mount point for /home (all of da2) nor to create partitions for da3 (on to which I wanted to install 4.5). Using F1 for help was singularly unhelpful. It was more concerned with explaining Unix partitions to microsoft users than explaining how to get the bloody installer to allow me define mount points for existing partitions and to create new partitions on the disk onto which I wanted to install 4.5. Clearly, I could have missed something but I'm at a loss. Can I not set up four disks with various versions of freeBSD and /home on them and get all the partitions available from the new installation on the fourth disk? In retrospect, I'm wondering if I should have not tried to put the boot manager on da2 (/home) since it isn't bootable anyways. Could that have been the problem? Wouldn't the disklable editor have simply allowed me to skip to da3? I guess I could have selected it (so that I could define a mount point for it) but chosen *not* to put a boot manager on it. Surely the disklabel editor is smart enough not to be confused by something like that -- after all, the fstab that it will produce will have other disks and partitions to mount that are not what will be running when that fstab is being used anyways. Please tell me what I'm doing wrong. Kindest regards, Charlie -- Charlie Sorsby [EMAIL PROTECTED] P. O. Box 1225 Edgewood, NM 87015 USA _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"