[oi-dev] Hipster 2020.10 text installer ISO Wow!!!!

[Reginald Beardsley]

That was singularly unsuccessful.  It got confused by all the other pools and apparently FreeBSD 12.2 created a "zroot" pool which was "corrupted" and could not be destroyed in any fashion using zpool. I'll find out more when "ZFS Essentials" , "Solaris Internals" 2nd ed and McKusic et al arrive.

So I did what admins have done since long before I started using Unix.  I wiped the label with dd(1) and started over.  Boy was I ever starting over!

That resulted in "format -e" dumping core again.  And even after I created a 4.5 TiB ntfs file system using a standalone gparted disk  it completely hosed the geometry on the drive and put me back in the geometry definition dialog I had not seen since I was running dual 141 MB disks on Emulex cards as LUN 0 & 1 on the same SCSI target.  Sun very helpfully put that feature in the generic 4.4.1a kernel for the 3/60.  That was very useful cutting down the length of the SCSI bus.  With 4 shoeboxes it was fragile.  Just moving the cables would make it fail.  So I consolidated the drives and eliminated 1 shoebox and cable.

In general format(1m) and the install programs cannot find the drive and get correct geometry from it.  I don't recall the SCSI code page commands to feed format(1m) to read the data.  But format(1m) needs some serious work.  It should not dump core.

As John helpfully pointed out, the text installs on the 2 disks are *not* the same.  And the text install ISO has the very helpful feature of using white text on a light colored background so that people who have macular degeneration get extra help in making their life more difficult than it already is.

BTW The labeling is inconsistent some screens have "F2_continue" and some of the later screens have "ESC-2_continue", though it's actually still F2.

Yes, sir.  A real quality product.  No effort expended to make it work smoothly.

Reg

BTW I'll see if I can capture what format(1m) says when I tell it the disk speed is 7200 rpm.  I don't recall, but it's pretty funny, I remember that.  Even 30 years ago the raw geometry stuff was actually obsolete, though still often needed.  I'm not concerned that my drive is ruined, because it's not.  I've been here and fixed this before.  It's just tedious and a bit disappointing to see "format -e" dump core again.  It will be pretty funny in a rather sad sort of way if I have to install Linux or Windows to make Hipster install.