Installation Problems

This section of the appendix covers problems you might encounter following the initial installation of FreeBSD and possible solutions to these problems.

Booting from Floppy Causes System to Hang or Reboot

A few things can cause a system to hang or reboot when booting from a floppy, but a bad floppy is the most likely cause. Remember that the boot image is written to the floppy without checking the format, and that the entire floppy is used regardless of how much space the disk image consumes. Even a single bad block on the floppy can cause problems. Try writing the boot disk image to a new floppy and see if it fixes the problem.

If using a new floppy does not help, and you used FTP to obtain the disk image file or to send it to the machine where you made the floppy, make sure you used binary mode and not ASCII mode during the transfer. Transferring in ASCII mode can ruin binary files.

Virus protection on the motherboard is another possible cause of this problem. You can disable this protection in the system's BIOS setup utility. Please refer to your system documentation for information on how to disable your motherboard's virus protection features.

Boot Floppy Hangs at "Probing Devices"

The boot floppy sometimes gets confused by unusual hardware on the IDE chain such as Zip and Jaz drives. If you have one of these drives, try removing it and see if the system will boot. If it does, you can install FreeBSD and then reconnect the drive after the installation is complete.

System Boots from CD, but Installer Shows That CD-ROM Was Not Found

This problem is probably caused by an improperly configured CD-ROM drive. Remember that there is space for four devices in most PCsa master and a slave on each of the two IDE chains. Some systems ship with the CD-ROM drive as a slave drive on the secondary controller and have no master drive on the secondary controller. Some CD-ROM drives cannot operate properly in slave mode. To fix this, you will need to open up the computer and use the jumpers and the indicated pin diagram to change your CD-ROM drive to the master position on its IDE chain. When your system first starts up, it usually displays a list of disks it found, including CD-ROM drives, as well as information about whether they are configured as master or slave disks.

Hard Disk Geometry Is Not Detected Properly

If FreeBSD cannot detect your hard disk geometry correctly, there are two ways this can usually be fixed:

• You first might create a small DOS partition at the beginning of the disk. This partitioning will usually cause FreeBSD to see the right geometry.

• The second way is to use the pfdisk program included on the DVD packaged with this book (located in the tools directory). pfdisk runs under DOS and will usually detect the proper geometry of the hard disk; you then can give the FreeBSD partition the proper geometry manually.

Micron and/or Other Systems Hang When Booting

Some Micron (and possibly other) systems have buggy PCI BIOS routines. This can cause PCI devices to be configured incorrectly when they are probed, resulting in unexpected behavior such as hangs or freezes during boot or inoperative Ethernet cards. You can work around this problem by disabling the Plug-and-Play support in the BIOS setup utility.