Installing From Cf... (strange Issue I Had)

[Sequethin]

Last night I was installing a snapshot from a new 1GB CF card.  I didn't think it would cause me issues, but I actually ran into something strange.  I thought using ext2 as the filesystem on the card would be fine (I wasnt sure if openbsd and freebsd used the same FS, I'm still a bsd newb). Basically what happened is that I when I got to the stage of the install where it asked me where my installation sets were, and I selected disk and wd1, I was told that there were no partitions on the card! This really scared me.

To make a long story short , escaping to a shell from the install (!) and using fdisk, disklabel, and newfs to prepare the card first worked for me. I had been trying to prepare the disk with FreeBSD. Also, instead of using ext2 I formatted with ffs. FreeBSD was able to mount the card after that and so I was able to continue with the install. I am only posting this in case someone else has the same issue... it really scared me, especially because it was a brand new card and I thought I killed it while fooling with fdisk (and of course the thought of bricking my zaurus and having to do all sorts of black magic to get it back was on my mind too...)

In any event, I now have a fully functional system. I wish I could find that usb ethernet card that I bought... *sigh*

--Mike

P.S. Why don't I use OpenBSD on my desktop? 2 reasons: Audigy z2  + nvidia geforce 6800  Oh how I wish nvidia would be open...........

[Shaka]

Something interesting also happened to me when installing sets from a 1GB CF card.  My other system is a windows laptop, so the CF was formatted as Fat32.  However, every time I told it where to find the sets, it told me nothing was there.  I dropped to shell, verified the files, and tried again, nothing.  Then it hit me, windows saved the files as upper case instead of lower case.  I had to copy the sets to already formatted hard drive, then go through and manually rename all the sets to lower case before it worked smoothly.

Stupid windows not using a proper filesystem.

[johnwong]

I have the same problem! I used a 512M CF, fdisk and disklabel it with a Thinkpad computer running OpenBSD. I followed the installation procedure, fdisk and disklabel in the Zaurus. when it asked where is the sets to copy. I specified wd1, BSD4.2, subdir! When I hit return, it printed file:///mnt2/subdir/ not found!

I quit to shell and manually mount the CF and found that everything there. I did not use the / as told in the INSTALL.Zaurus. Install given up and don't know what to do!  

JW

[Shaka]

One suggestion, not sure if it will help, possibly try mounting it first, and then when the installer asks you if it is already mounted, just point it to the path.  The other option is closer to what I did, you should already have a formatted hard drive, copy the files over to the local drive, and try from there.

- Renzo

[johnwong]

It didn't work! I tried mount it and install as normal. Same problem happened and I forced to quit. I tried list the mounted directory. I found nothing inside! I guess it was umounted upon running the install program!

I then restore it back to Sharp ROM!  

Can anyone tell me how they installed the OpenBSD sucessfully! the media set are CDROM or "TAPE Drive"?

JW

[Sequethin]

what I did was follow INSTALL.zaurus until the installer was running, shelled out and set up my cf card, put the card into my card reader and used my desktop (running freebsd) to put all the install sets onto to card, then return to the install (exit from the shell) and tell it that my sets were on disk wd1. It found them and continued along happily.

Mike