On Tue, 8 Feb 2000, Manuel Bouyer wrote:

>On Tue, Feb 08, 2000 at 03:13:09PM +1030, Tim Peters wrote:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> I've been trying to install NetBSD 1.4.1 on an old otherwise
>> unused 386, to have a look at it. The machine has 8M of ram, and
>> two hard disks, the second of which has an msdos filesystem and
>> {base,etc,kern}.tgz. I'm using the 1.2M boot-tiny.fs boot image.
>> 
>> The install procedure seems to go fine until it starts to
>> uncompress the kern.tgz file, after which the system freezes.
>> 
>> Thinking this was perhaps due to a shortage of memory, I have
>> tried installing the files from the shell instead of from
>> sysinst, and used "swapctl -a /dev/wd0b" to add swap space before
>> uncompressing. This didn't work; still when uncompressing the
>> tgz's, it freezes after one or two files.
>
>How many swap do you have ?

During the setup I choose to add 25M of swap at /dev/wd0b.
So I guess I should ask; is "swapctl -a" the only command needed
to use this swap space? I ask because with Linux I had to use
"mkswap" first.

>> I can *list* the packages fine, so I know they're ok.
>> 
>> The only other clue that might be relevant is that after booting
>> I get a few messages of the form: "warning: stray interrupt 7",
>> and then "Logging stopped.".
>> 
>> So, can anyone offer some advice for these problems? Otherwise I
>> might have to reinstall Linux on the machine :-)
>
>Don't you have error messages from the kernel (you may want to use
>tar xf instead of xvf to see error messages) ?

No, there is nothing, just a complete lock up.

I'm a little confused since I can write fine to both disks, until
I try to untar. Although it might be something to do with the two
disks being active at the same time, since copying files from one
disk to another causes the same lock-up. perhaps the hardware is
too old and too flakey.

Thanks for your help,

Tim Peters