Newbie needs help with installation tasks.
I am trying to install FreeBSD 4.7R on an Intel Celeron 300MHz PC which has a 4GB hard drive and Windows 98 installed. I have used Partition Magic to shrink the Windows partition on my hard drive from 4GB to 3GB and created a 1GB partition for the FreeBSD installation. Partition Magic didn't offer support for preparing a partition for FreeBSD installation so I elected to create a FAT32 partition reasoning that the FreeBSD installation process would reformat the partition for the required file system. I downloaded 4.7-mini.iso from FreeBSD.org and used Nero/Express to burn the file system to a CD-R disk. I viewed the CD-R disk with a utility called ISOBUSTER and it appeared to be a bootable CDROM. I marked my 1GB partition as active and rebooted my PC, after selecting CDROM as the first device in my BIOS settings. I got an error message 'Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM ; Failure...' Invalid system disk I searched the available docs on the Internet and concluded that I would have to boot from floppies as my PC would not allow booting from the CDROM device, despite the BIOS settings. I formatted two floppy disks and used the /tools/fdimage utility on the CD-R disk to copy /floppies/kern.flp and /floppies/mfsroot.flp to the floppy disks. I rebooted again with the new partition marked as active after selecting the floppy drive as the first boot device in the BIOS settings. I got the FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader message as expected but instead of being prompted to insert the mfsroot disk I got the following messages... /kernel text=0x2833b1 zf_read: unexpected EOF zf_read: unexpected EOF elf_loadexec: archsw.readin failed. can't load module '/kernel'; input/output error. The boot process then indicated that it was... Booting [kernel] and promptly produced the same error messages as before indicating that it could not load 'kernel' or 'kernel.old' Until two days ago I didn't have any prior experience with CD-R burning, using Partition Magic, or installation of a UNIX operating system so I am quite prepared to believe I have made mistakes in the pre-installation tasks. However, after searching the Internet for descriptions of similar problems I am unsure how to proceed. I would appreciate any advice on why I couldn't install from the CD-R DISK and/or why I can't boot from the floppies. _ MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-questions in the body of the message
Re: Newbie needs help with installation tasks.
On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 11:19:35PM +, Steve Gladstone wrote: I formatted two floppy disks and used the /tools/fdimage utility on the CD-R disk to copy /floppies/kern.flp and /floppies/mfsroot.flp to the floppy disks. I rebooted again with the new partition marked as active after selecting the floppy drive as the first boot device in the BIOS settings. I got the FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader message as expected but instead of being prompted to insert the mfsroot disk I got the following messages... /kernel text=0x2833b1 zf_read: unexpected EOF zf_read: unexpected EOF elf_loadexec: archsw.readin failed. can't load module '/kernel'; input/output error. This looks to me like a problem with one of the floppy disks you made. Try again with a fresh floppy. From experience, I've found that there's quite a high failure rate on floppy disks used in this way --- a single bad sector on the disk will make it useless for booting a kernel from. If you've got a FreeBSD machine available, running fdformat(1) on the floppy and making sure that it formats without error will generally confirm that the floppy is usable. Plus reformatting the disk seems to improve you chances of success when you copy one of the download disk images onto it. Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks Savill Way PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Marlow Tel: +44 1628 476614 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe freebsd-questions in the body of the message
