[1635] in NetBSD-Development
Installation Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Daniel P Kamalic)
Mon Mar 23 05:10:37 1998
From: Daniel P Kamalic <pocky@MIT.EDU>
To: netbsd-dev@MIT.EDU
Cc: pocky@MIT.EDU, zacheiss@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 23 Mar 1998 05:10:15 EST
Hi,
I've been trying to install the 1.3-Athena prerelease on two of
my machines. I've actually encountered the same problem on both of
them. Nathan Williams suggested I send as detailed a report as possible
to netbsd-dev:
Machine: pockyfiend.mit.edu refiners-fire.mit.edu
Disk: 2.5 GB Quantum Bigfoot 206 MB Seagate ST
Partition: 350 MB 204 MB
RAM: 32 MB 20 MB
CPU: AMD 5x86-133 i486DX2-66
I first tried to install on refiners-fire. Nothing was on the 2
MB first partition, and the 204 MB second partition was set as a BSD
partition. At first, I chose reasonable values for cache and swap (I
think I chose 20M for each), but the install failed because it was
running out of disk. (Presumably not enough space in /u1.) I then took
the default values (11m and 14m), and the install succeeded. However,
on bootup, it stopped with the prompt:
root device: [wd0a]
Pressing return for wd0a, it said "no root device" and repeated
itself. I tried typing wd0a in manually, and it still didn't work. I
also tried wd0e, wd0f, wd0, and fd0a (with the boot floppy inside).
Nothing worked.
A similar thing happened when I tried to install to pockyfiend.
I set aside a 350MB third partition in addition to a 326MB first
partition, which currently housed NetBSD 1.2. The install detected both
partitions as "wd0", and I chose to install to "wd0". The install then
used the default starting sector and length of the first partition. I
gave it the values from my new third partition instead.
The install went smoothly, but after the reboot, I discovered
that the install had wiped my mbr, and pfdisk now detected no
partitions. I ran fdisk /mbr from a DOS floppy and then reconstructed
my partition table using pfdisk. I installed OS/BS again and set it to
recognize the new NetBSD 1.3 third partition. I booted off the third
partition, but the boot died right where it had died on refiners-fire.
The install also wiped the partition table on Garry Zacheiss's
ampersand.mit.edu, a PII-266 with 64MB of RAM, installing onto a 1.5 GB
partition on a 5 GB disk.
The install seems to corrupt the mbr on any machine which
already has a boot loader installed. All data is still present on the
disk, but you need to manually reconstruct the partition table and
reinstall the boot loader.
We haven't tried installing onto any machine that uses SCSI
disks, so it's possible that this problem is IDE-specific.
On a lighter note, regarding Yoav's email regarding a "How To
Maintain NetBSD" guide for new users, we'd be interested in helping.
Based on what we've heard so far, we agree with kcr that
documentation should draw something from the private SPARCstation guide
that already exists, rather than following the Linux guide. (We've been
looking at the SPARCstation document.) Let us know if you'd like our help!
Dan Kamalic
and Garry Zacheiss
P.S.: If you'd like any more specific information about the failed
installs, please contact us. (I still have the data on pf's third partition.)
