Re: New ISO available / ...

[Garance A Drosihn <drosih@xxxxxxx>]

At 8:39 PM -0700 4/22/04, Matthew Dillon wrote:
>     A new 'stable' ISO is available on the download page.
>     Stable meaning post all the recent networking commits.

I finally tried my hand at installing this.  In my case, the
disk already had four slices on it, and I wanted to install
into the second slice.

Is it true that I would need to
     cd /dev
     ./MAKEDEV ad0s2a
before I could do anything with partitions in that second slice?
I did that, and it seemed to do the trick, but the README didn't
mention it.

I wouldn't ask, but once I was done with all the steps, the result
does not work.  It is QUITE LIKELY that it was something I screwed
up, because I was pretty tired when I was doing it.  I know I was
confused for a little while, for instance, and it turned out that
I had skipped over the 'cpdup' for /etc to /mnt/etc...

I went through the README, and everything seemed okay.  I umount'ed
all the /mnt partitions, and rebooted.  The boot-0 prompt (where you
hit a function key to boot from some specific slice) would not let
me select slice 2 (dragonfly) or slice 3 (an already-installed
FreeBSD 5.2.1).  It would only let me boot from slice 1.  Now,
slice-1 is a left-over install of OpenBSD from long-ago, and it has
NOT been reinstalled since I recently re-partitioned all the slices
on this disk.  So who knows *what* it did when I booted up on it.  I
didn't really mean to do that, but when the loader wouldn't let me
select the other slices I "just sat there", and eventually boot0
booted up the ancient slice while I was wondering what I should do.

I found that if I boot up off a FreeBSD install CD, and drop into
the boot loader, than I can boot slice 3 (the freebsd slice).  When
I tried to mount the dragonfly slices from the FreeBSD 5 system, it
wouldn't let me.  Should that work?  Or will freebsd be confused by
the changes so Dragonfly supports more partitions per slice?

Btw, I wanted to do that because I had saved away "history" outputs
of the exact commands I typed in, and I wanted to check those out.
It might be useful to suggest something like that in the README,
although it might also be a waste of time to worry about such things
when we know the entire install process is very likely to change.

It is highly likely that the problems I'm seeing are my own fault,
and this *is* a test machine where it is fine if I have to reinstall
everything.  So don't worry about the problems.  I was just curious
about these few things which came up while I was playing around.

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@xxxxxxxxxxx
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@xxxxxxx