Hi everyone.
I'm trying to install FreeBSD 8.1 i386 on an old computer (P4 @2.5GHz, no HT). It has one harddrive, ad0, and one optical drive, acd0. They are masters of different IDE channels or whatever the terminology is. I try to install over ftp using the bootonly cd, but I also tried dvd1. Both fails at the same step. The error I see is
which is my swap partition.
While googling, I found some mail conversation suggesting running
What's interesting is the I was able to install PC-BSD 8.1 without problems on the same drive. I was also able to install Ubuntu 10.10rc on it, and it used to host an XP install, so the drive seems fine.
It seems like install fails at the stage where it updates the slice (DOS partition) table, because it seems unaffected after a reboot. It doesn't even seem to update it if I press 'w' in the slice editor. If I check the debug output using Alt-F2, it says something like "the GEOM or GPART something is corrupt (recovery highly recommended)".
Any ideas?
I'm trying to install FreeBSD 8.1 i386 on an old computer (P4 @2.5GHz, no HT). It has one harddrive, ad0, and one optical drive, acd0. They are masters of different IDE channels or whatever the terminology is. I try to install over ftp using the bootonly cd, but I also tried dvd1. Both fails at the same step. The error I see is
Code:
Unable to create device node /dev/ad0s1b
While googling, I found some mail conversation suggesting running
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 cb=64k count=1
or something similar, which worked in that case, but not in mine (I ran if from SystemRescueCD but with /dev/hda). It zeroed out the partition table, but FreeBSD still fails with the same error.What's interesting is the I was able to install PC-BSD 8.1 without problems on the same drive. I was also able to install Ubuntu 10.10rc on it, and it used to host an XP install, so the drive seems fine.
It seems like install fails at the stage where it updates the slice (DOS partition) table, because it seems unaffected after a reboot. It doesn't even seem to update it if I press 'w' in the slice editor. If I check the debug output using Alt-F2, it says something like "the GEOM or GPART something is corrupt (recovery highly recommended)".
Any ideas?