Newbie to BSD

[junkman4547]

Thanks for the reply, Darkprince...

The error for floppy drive is:

Could not start program "mdir". Ensure that the ..mtools...
package is installed correctly on your system.

For cdrom..... when I used ....

#mount -t cd9660/dev/acd0

the error was

Could not mount device, the reported error was
cd9660: /dev/acd0: Operation not permitted

And when I used the command.....

#mount /dev/acd0

the error was

The process for the media died unexpectedly.

I'm sure there is a log for these errors, I just couldn't find
the log yet

[junkman4547]

One curious observation......I checked my fstab file and noticed that the floppy drive is not listed there ! ! !

could this be my problem for not be able to read from it ?....

[George Harrison]

Check fstab and make corrections, change permissions, mount, and you should be ready to go.

[darkprince]

Could not mount device, the reported error was
cd9660: /dev/acd0: Operation not permitted

are you doing this as root?

regarding fstab ... you don't need entries in fstab unless you are just going to do
#mount /dev/acd0

With FreeBSD instead of using the '-t' switch you can do the following
mount_cd9660
mount_nfs
mount_msdosfs
etc etc.

[junkman4547]

Thanks for the tips George.....

Yes, Darkprince, I did it as root.

Apparently, my FreeBSD Handbook is a volume
one. And there is a volume two which may
contains the infos I need. No wonder I couldn't
find any infos relevant to the problems I'm trying
to solve.

[jaboua]

Volume two is on the net too (no, not illegally), here: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...ook/index.html

At least I think it's the same one, however all the info needed for most operations is described there.

[junkman4547]

Thanks Jaboua, I found out about the second volume when
the potential solutions I found referred to chapter 12 on the
handbook. I check my book and there is no chapter 12 !!!

I downloaded the whole thing onto my HD for easy reading
off line...

As a side note.....

I finally did the ....emerge --update world ....on my Gentoo....
didn't realize that it would take approx. 15 hours.....(groan)..
and when it's done.....my Gentoo box is so screwed up that
it would no longer boot ! ! ! ......ah-h-h-h-g-g-g-g-g.

[jaboua]

I finally did the ....emerge --update world ....on my Gentoo.... didn't realize that it would take approx. 15 hours.....(groan).. and when it's done.....my Gentoo box is so screwed up that it would no longer boot ! ! ! ......ah-h-h-h-g-g-g-g-g.

Damn... Have you tried getting into it with the livecd to try fix it (if you still have it installed)? Did you get any errors? And any errors at boot?

[junkman4547]

Unfortunately, I was so discouraged that I decided to start
over and erased the whole drive. The last message that
I got from that process was an error message about KDE
graphic. Gentoo was trying to boot but when it got to
initializing the peripherals......it hung up there for a long while..
then stopped and gave me a totally blank desktop without
any icons at all.....

[jaboua]

Maybe the FS was corrupted? Any unclean shutdowns (readressing the power-button)