Installation

I have a NEC 360T (300mhz, 64mb ram, 2 pcmcia slots, 4gb drive) which is giving me a lot of issues.

First, I used physdiskwrite to copy the image to the hard drive, but when booting from that disk it gives a "read error"  - I tried smooth wall and the same thing happen, but Freenas will install just fine on the drive and boot.  Haven't tried any other BSD/Linux variants - need more ram for them to complete the installs, haven't tried damn small linux yet.

With booting from the hard drive out, I tried CD booting, but I can only have the CD Rom or floppy in at a time, although I have cannibalized another slim line drive to make an extension of sorts so I can store to a floppy, because

when I insert a usb 128mb pen drive I get the message that "no FAT formatted device found." Yet when I insert a USB drive I get

da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: ( Pen Drive PMAP) Removable Direct Access SCSI-0 device
da0: 1.000MB/s transfers
da0: 123MB (251904 512 byte sectors: 64H 32S/T 123C

So it's not detecting during boot, only after, although my PCMCIA cards have not come yet, so I can't test writing a configuration.

Preferably I'd like to be able to just boot off the hard drive.  (since I'm borrowing a power adapter and slim line cd rom)

Any ideas?

Read error comes up quite a bit. Not sure what the answer is, as I've never seen it, but check the list archives and you might find an answer.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22read+error%22+site%3Am0n0.ch

Read error comes up quite a bit. Not sure what the answer is, as I've never seen it, but check the list archives and you might find an answer.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22read+error%22+site%3Am0n0.ch

Wonderful.  I looked through that, used the monowall live cd, turned off and on a bunch of hard drive features in my bios, tried turning off auto detect on the hard drive settings to manual.  No luck.

I wonder about PF sense giving me the same trouble.  My solution might just be either a different disk - meaning a 2.5>3.5 adapter if those are even made, new cd rom drive or floppy/cd combo.


*edit* - strange I used my Ultimate Boot CD and chose to boot "first hard disk" and it worked, loaded my 1.11 image off the live cd.  I then went into smart boot manager and chose HDA4

If only I could install Smart Boot Manager to my hard drive, and then have it automatically load the partition.  That or somehow get a Grub type loader on here

I've had the same problem - can't save generic-pc1.23.img to CF Card (whit CF to IDE adapter) or HDD, and exactly the same mesage. I think there is some problem with physdiskwrite0.5.1.
I used dd command -> DamnSmallLinux to save the image on CFcard. I use m0n0 around 6~7 months and can say I am very pleased .

Sorry for my bad english.

-Whit kind REGARDS !

ended up just using a floppy image of "smart boot manager" to automatically load the correct partition.

it works and the floppy will be read once every 6 months, possibly less when I get my UPS going.

politicorific: would you mind posting back here with details on exactly what you did with "smart boot manager" to get m0n0wall booting? I know it would be of interest to people who run into this problem in the future.

politicorific: would you mind posting back here with details on exactly what you did with "smart boot manager" to get m0n0wall booting? I know it would be of interest to people who run into this problem in the future.

absolutely, although it's been a couple days so here's what I remember:

This is how I got my old laptop which could only use a cd-rom (which I didn't have), a floppy drive(which I did have), or a hard drive (which gave me the dreaded "read error")

Step one: Write the m0n0wall .img file of your preference to your media(flash/hd)

Step two: Get angry that your computer shows "read error"

Step three: Download smart boot manager - 3.7-1 from http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/

You want and only need "sbminst.exe"

Step four: find an old PC with a floppy drive, use sbminst to install to a floppy. 

Write protect the floppy just in case, smart boot manager asks if you want to save settings quite often

Step five:  insert floppy into m0n0wall box, set the bios to boot from floppy

Once the PC has booted it will read the floppy drive giving a text menu of options.  Smart boot manager does not detect SCSI drives, usb drives, but it may detect a cd rom.  Since you've already written the image to the drive you want, just choose "primary drive"  or "dev/xxx" under the partition list.

Voila, m0n0wall should boot.  After testing this a couple times, remove the floppy and turn off the write protect and restart the pc, now you should be able to select the primary boot option(f8) and set a delay timer of 1-2 seconds(control-t).  This way m0n0wall boots automatically without the 30 second timer.  Place floppy back in drive, save settings, remove floppy, and move write protect tab back in place.

The programmers of Smart Boot Manager do not encourage using sbminst.exe on hard drives - I had to re-write my partition tables a dozen times since this will install smbinst to the boot sector and the old notebook I was using didn't like this.  Try it out if you really want to pull out that floppy drive

Thanks politicorific!

Added to the wiki.

http://wiki.m0n0.ch/wikka.php?wakka=ReadErrorWorkAround

to make its way into the documentation eventually.