>Ond general installer question....  When you mount in the mini-shell, if
>the devices aren't there, it gives an error about the mount point, and if
>the mount point isn't there, I believe it gives an error about the device,
>and if the device is the wrong one (not a BSD partition), I think it gives
>an error about the mount point.  I may not be remembering it _exactly_,
>but at least two of those three were correct, at least with my copies --
>of 1.0 _and_ 1.1.  Are the error messages supposed to be that confusing?
>
I'll take a look at it and see what I can do...

>Why don't I get the phase errors with 1.1?  Just a coincidence?  Or are
>they being deliberately ignored?

The phase errors in the installer 1.0 seemed to be mostly attributable to
the installer treating the cd-rom drive as a regular hard disk("sd" type
device) and trying to read a partition map off of it, etc.  Once the
installer was taught that a cd-rom is not a regular hard drive, the phase
errors have stopped for everyone I have heard from.  They have not been
ignored and if anyone has seen them under installer 1.1 please let me know.

For the mkfs utility phase errors, the culprit seems to be when it tries
to do a mode sense - page 4 of the hard drive.  This operation looks to
have the intention of returning information about the geometry of the
drive.  Something about the operation itself or the way it is set up
seem to be consistently giving phase errors.  Initially, I did not have
time to play with it much.  But, I have been toying off and on with merging
the mkfs functionality into the installer for the last week, so I will probably
take a look at it again.  Probably would have made more progress this last
weekend, but Santa Clara was one of the areas hit by Saturday's multi-state
power outage(Isn't P.G.& E great??).

Steve Brown

p.s. For you non-west coasters, P.G.& E. == Pacific Gas & Electric.

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        It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
                                        -Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
                                        a.k.a Lewis Carroll
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