Subject: Warning--my stupidity
To: None <macbsd-general@sun-lamp.cs.berkeley.edu>
From: Franklin Chen <chen@adi.com>
List: macbsd-general
Date: 01/14/1994 08:51:49
I sort of got Alpha2 up on my SE/30.  For those of you who have bothered to
read my complaints in a couple of messages lately, I've found my main problem.
It seems that I incorrectly un{zipped,compressed} some of my .tar.{gz,Z} files.
That's why I got the "magic number" errors when trying to read the tar files.
BUT--the Installer (any version) didn't know the tar files were corrupt, and
proceeded to install!!  No wonder sbin/init, bin/sh, etc. didn't work.  The
kernel _did_ start up, but only because it hadn't been compressed or gzipped.
Yesterday after I downloaded the latest kernel and unzipped it, I couldn't
even boot, so I suspected I had done something quite wrong.  I found that the
default setting of the standalone macgzip-0.2 was to treat files as ascii and
automatically do the LF-CR conversion!  Obviously this is a *bad* thing to do
when you have a binary file.

I hope that nobody else has been as dumb as me.  If so, you're not alone :-).

I'm going to do a mkfs and reinstall everything from scratch tonight.  By the
way, are we supposed to mkdir stuff like /tmp ahead of time from the
installer?  What else needs to be created before boot?


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