FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE not bootable on a Dell Latitude D510

[John Nielsen]

On Wednesday 03 August 2005 01:56, Trond Endrestøl wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I received a Dell Latitude D510 yesterday and I wanted to boot FreeBSD
> 5.4-RELEASE from the computer's DVD drive.
>
> However, the booting process stopped abruptly with the following
> messages:
>
> fwohci0: EUI64 36:4f:c0:00:07:ce:d8:30
> NMI ISA b0, EISA ff
> RAM parity error, likely hardware failure.

I saw the same thing on the same hardware.  (The RAM was fine.)  Since I was 
booting into FreeBSD as a diagnostic measure and not to do an installation, 
I didn't pursue the matter much further.  I _think_ I was able to boot from 
a FreeBSD 5.2.1 CD. (I don't remember if I tried 5.3 or not.)  That might 
be the easiest approach, followed by an upgrarde from source with a custom 
(non-firewire) kernel.  If all else fails, you can build a kernel without 
firewire on another machine, make your own CD, and boot from that.

I'm not sure if a PR has been filed for this or not, or if the problem 
persists in 6.0-BETA1.

JN