problem installation freebsd

[Michal Pasternak]

marco [Fri, Mar 05, 2004 at 11:29:04AM +0100]:
> it is a acer 6680 with a mainboard of aopen model S58M
> i'm searched on lists, google and i talked on irc with italian group of 
> freebsd but i don't found a solution
> with 4.9 installation started but random stop during various step of 
> installation and give me an error like
> sync disk or similar

The exact name of the error you get is "kernel panic" (a few lines before
"syncing disks"). "Syncing disks" is just a message, telling you, that the
kernel is synchronizing in-memory disk cache with hard drives.

If it is a laptop, try booting it with different apm / acpi settings. To tweak
those settings, you should enter kernel configuration utility at boot time
(when "booting kernel in 10 seconds" message shows up, type "boot -c", then
"visual") - in 4.x. 5.x series has this done somewhat different.

I don't know if that Acer PC of yours has known issues - but in general, if
kernel panics occur randomly, this is propably a symptom of CPU overheating
- or bad random-access memory (RAM) chips. You can test your RAM using free
software from http://memtest86.com (please note, that you should run this
test at least for several hours if it doesn't break at once - some RAM chips
show errors only when they worked for a some time, so their temperature is
higher, than normal). 

Also, BIOS RAM timings matter in this case - if you can change it, lower it
a bit.

HTH,
-- 
mp