From: "Burrell, Mike" <BURRELLM@gresham.agw.bt.co.uk>
To: "'FREEBSD'" <www@FreeBSD.ORG>
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 95 12:42:00 GMT
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Resent-Date: Tue, 19 Dec 1995 12:24:53 -0500 (EST)
Resent-From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu>
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I recently attempted to perform a 'novice' install of FreeBSD on to a system 
and encountered a number of problems that I was hoping you could resolve for 
me.

1. When using the installers fdisk utility I chose to use my second Hard 
Drive rather than my C:.  It showed the FAT, one partition and 4032 blocks 
unused on this drive.  The disk in question was WD Caviar with 1.2GB total 
space and 600MB free and had been recently defragmented. I was curious why 
the installer couldn't see that there was free space to create a partition.

2. When ever I undid my actions associated with partitioning/labelling the 
installer would insist that I was trying to use my C: rather than the D: I 
had selected in a previous screen.  This meant that once I had undone all 
changes I had to reboot and start the installation from scratch.

3. Next I downloaded FIPS and ran it creating 121MB partition on D:, this 
worked very well.  I ran the installer again from the boot disk, this time 
when I got to the fdisk screen there were two large, used, partitions.  I 
deleted the partition created by fips then created another using fdisk. 
 this appeared to work so I continued with installation.  I was installing 
from the dos partition on D:.  I got an error message which said something 
like 'couldn't find installation files'.  The installer then requested that 
I insert a root disk, I didn't have one so I pressed ok inserting the boot 
disk and the system froze.  I restarted my machine and it wouldn't boot.  I 
assumed that because I had been installing on to a partition on D: that my 
C: would have been safe.

4. It transpired that somehow the C: had been made unbootable and that the 
installer had wiped out the VFAT required by Win 95.  Luckily I had a boot 
disk and from this managed to reinstall Win 95 from CD, after trying many 
other methods of fixing my dead C:.  The re-installation as I hoped 
rectified the situation and I incurred, as far as I can tell, no data loss.

5. I am aware that backing-up is advisable prior to installations of this 
type however I was wondering if  is safe to attempt another installation of 
FreeBSD, naturally I am hesitant.  I was also curious as to whether the 
installers insistence to use C: (see point 2) was connected to the damage 
incurred on C:

Any advice you could give on the above points would be greatly appreciated