Failed installation of FreeBSD 5.4

[Milscvaer]

--- "Gary W. Swearingen" <garys at opusnet.com> wrote:

> Milscvaer <millueradfa at yahoo.com> writes:
> 
> > I am sorry, I should explain the situation a more
> > clearly.
> 
> And I'm sorry that I don't have much more to say.
> 

First, I apologise for being so upset. I was rather
frustrated by this.

> I think that BTX stuff is part of "boot2".  I know
> this is a
> fairly common problem (which I've had too), but I
> don't know
> what to do about it beyond "doing something
> different". :(
> 
> Normally you would want to use at the boot: prompt:
>          0:ad(0,a)/boot/loader
> instead of 
>          0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel
> 

This is the critical information I needed to know! I
tried /boot/loader and I am now able to boot into
FreeBSD 5.4 off the floppy! After booting, Everything
seems to be fine and as it should be. This is great, I
can just leave the floppy in the drive, and boot from
that. There must be something wrong with the boot
records that fdisk is not correcting. 

I know friends who have had unuseable boot records as
well and have to boot from floppies, Its not really a
big inconvenience.

To be honest, FreeBSD is the only OS that seems to run
on this system, I tried OpenBSD and NetBSD and both
cannot even boot into the installer. 

FreeBSD is still a good OS.

Thank you for all of your help, I really appreciate
it. 

> I'd normally guess that the disk geometry has gotten
> confused somehow,
> but if you're able to see the 5.4 files with the
> fixit disk, geometry
> is probably OK.
> 
> The fixit floppy usually doesn't have the command
> one needs to do what
> one wants to do, but I should support replacing the
> HDD MBR with
> fdisk, using a DOS-style MBR that you have to set
> the active
> partition.  Then that should boot to 5.4's boot1
> sector which should
> start boot2, which should start /boot/loader or give
> a prompt.
> If the fixit floppy has bsdlabel (and has a
> /boot/boot1, etc), you
> could try replacing the boot1 & boot2 records, but
> don't wipe out
> the disk's bsdlabel.
> 


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