From: sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Stephen Tweedie) Subject: Re: Magic match failed! Date: 16 Oct 92 16:50:10 GMT In article , Bill.Viggers@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Bill Viggers) writes: > Nntp-Posting-Host: debretts.comp.vuw.ac.nz > I tried using the SLS release 0.98 for the first time last night. > Placing the a1 disk in the drive, all proceded fine. However after > it said 'place root disk in the drive' things began to fail rather > badly. I placed the disk a2 (as this is the other rawrite'ed disk I > assume this is the root disk) in the drive and got a message 'magic > match failed', along with: > magic match failed (a second time) > [cms-dos FS rel. alpha 8, FAT 12, check=n, conv=b] > [no=cxf9, cs=1, #f=2, fs=1, f1=7, ds=15, de=224, data=29, se=2400,es=0] > no bmap support > What have I done wrong? And is it likely to be related to > installing a new HD on my machine? > Bill The "magic match failed" message is issued by the kernel when it tries to mount a file system and cannot find the correct header information for that file system on the block device. When Linux mounts the root partition, it tries to look for all the different possible file system types on the partition in the order minix, extfs, dosfs. It does this by trying to mount the different types in that order, until one of the mounts succeeds. The messages you describe means that linux has mounted a DOS filing system as root --- the two magic match failures mean that linux has failed to find a minix or an extfs file system, and the rest of the blurb is the standard information printed out whenever linux mounts a dos file system. I'm not familiar with SLS --- I started out with mcc-interim --- but I suspect that your rawritten disk should NOT have a dos file system on it; mounting a dos file system as root is legal, but probably not what was intended. Rawrite should be able to create a valid minix disk, completely overwriting the dos information formatted onto it by the dos format command. Your best bet might be to download the a2 disk again. Then again, I might be talking garbage... Your mileage may vary. Good luck anyway - Who said Linux was the best thing since sliced bread? Sliced bread doesn't even come close! Cheers, Stephen Tweedie. --- Stephen Tweedie (Internet: ) Department of Computer Science, Edinburgh University, Scotland.