FreeBSD 9-RELEASE install fails

C

CrisXed

Hi everyone,

I'm new to FreeBSD and decided to try to install it on a vintage machine I own. The machine is a IBM thinkpad 380Z, it's a pentium2 with 64MB of RAM and a hard drive with 4GB, unfortunately the machine has no inbuilt networking, either wired or wireless.

Before attempting to install FreeBSD the machine was running windows XP without any problems (the boot up was slightly slow though, as expected).

So I downloaded the 9-RELEASE ISO from the FreeBSD website, burnt it to a CD and followed the handbook, trying to install FreeBSD on the machine using bsdinstall. On the step to choose the partitions/slices I chose guided and I accepted the suggested layout:
Code: 
    ada0    3.8GB  GPT
    ada0p1  64kB   freebsd-boot
    ada0p2  3.6GB  freebsd-ufs   /
    ada0p3  195MB  freebsd-swap  none

The PC starts writing the partitions to disk and then stops with the following error:
Code: 
    Error mounting partition /mnt
    mount: /dev/ada0p2 : Input/output error

At this point I have no idea what to do. I've been searching for a bit to see if I could find anyone with the same problem and I could only find this thread: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=29456 However it's not quite the same problem but I tried some of the suggestions and nothing solved my problem.

I'm still kind of new to all this UNIX and stuff (I've dabbled in linux, but nothing serious), and I'm a complete newbie to FreeBSD and I can make no sense of this. I would be extremely thankful if someone could help me out, or just point me in the right direction.

If you need any more information about my machine or any other details in order to help me, I'll be happy to provide it.

Thanks for any help you can give me.
 
I doubt you will have much fun with that kind of hardware when you want graphical user interfaces, if at all possible. A minimum of 512 MB Ram is recommended. No buildin networking makes it worse. What you have is good for a most minimal installation, meaning no graphical components, only command line. But if you still insist installing FreeBSD, you could wipe the disk first, e.g. with gparted, creating a new partition, e.g. fat32, retry installation.
Or, to take a look on how FreeBSD can be, take PC-BSD's live DVD and run it on decent hardware.
 
Hi, thanks for the reply.

I did try wiping the disk and attempting to install, I tried both with MBR and GPT but I don't think I tried placing a FAT partition in those partitioning schemes, only freebsd ones, I'll give it a try again with a FAT partition.

I also took a look at PC-BSD before opting for FreeBSD, however the minimum requirements are too high for this computer.

I was thinking of installing FreeBSD on this machine just to get an idea of how stuff works in FreeBSD, and I am aware that asking for a graphical environment might be too much for it. I thought I had posted to the "Base System/Installing & Upgrading" forum (http://forums.freebsd.org/forumdisplay.php?f=4), where I thought this thread made more sense, after all my problem is with the installation. Since the thread was moved to this forum (Desktop Usage), I get the reason for the question, but that is not my intended use for this laptop.
 
The error makes me think bad sector on the hard drive. On hardware that old, it wouldn't be a surprise. It may have been unused in the Windows install.
 
So, I tried the FAT32 partition and I still get the same error.

About the bad sector(s) I believe that might be the case, I'd be surprised if there weren't any bad sectors. What has me completely baffled is that Windows did not have any problems with the disk and the linux live cds I used had no problems mounting the filesystem. I have no idea why they can move around that potential problem and FreeBSD can't.

I'll give the ultimatebootcd a try to see what it gives me...
 
The point of creating a FAT32 partition is not clear to me. Certainly FreeBSD won't use it.

The difference between an existing filesystem that can be read by Windows or Linux and a new filesystem that is trying to be written to by FreeBSD is the difference between reading and writing. That sector might have been unused in the original filesystem, or might have gone bad later but been in a file that was not read. If a bad sector is the problem, any operating system will have trouble writing to it.
 
My reasoning for the FAT partition was that since it worked previously with this partition, I would try again and see if it made a difference, it could be some strange error with different partitions/partitioning schemes. I do not know if that was T-Daemon's reasoning...
Anyway, it seems FreeBSD does have a use for FAT partitions as the installation script let me set up a single FAT partition for the whole disk and use it as the root directory. Then it gave me the mount error like before, but at this level it would seem it's possible to install FreeBSD on a FAT partition.

Ultimatebootcd is also no go. First their website seems really outdated, several of the download links were broken... not a good omen. So I downloaded it burnt it to a disk and to my surprise the thinkpad doesn't event boot from it. I guess it has to do with the boot scheme used on the disk, I have no idea, but no boot for ultimatebootcd, I will keep it though as it seems a useful tool.

Going back to the bad sectors, it still confuses me a bit. I do get wblock's point, however in that case the error should be doing the write, or maybe the write check (FreeBSD does check that a write to disk is successful?) and not during the mount as the error states.
 
"FAT partition" doesn't really have a meaning. FreeBSD would change the type of that partition to 165 and format it with UFS.

Go to a shell, use gpart(8) to create the same partitions as the default install, then format ada0p2 and see if it actually shows an error that is being hidden by the installer. Off the top of my head:
Code: 
# gpart destroy -F ada0
# gpart create -s gpt ada0
# gpart add -t freebsd-boot -s 64k ada0
# gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -s 3800m ada0
# gpart add -t freebsd-swap ada0
# newfs -U /dev/ada0p2
 
So I tried creating the partitions manually and no problems.

I also tried a manual mount and no problems again... I really don't get it. Is it possible that the gpart, newfs and mount commands only act on the data in the computers memory (RAM) and that I have to somehow explicitly write it to disk?

Maybe I should try a manual install? How difficult is it?
 
After doing those steps above and mounting the new UFS partition on /mnt, you can have bsdinstall skip the partition editor and just install.
 
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