Dell PE850 and FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE - Boot Issues

[Jeff Cross]

Adam Martin wrote:
> 
> On 2006 Sep 18 , at 17:54, Adam Martin wrote:
> 
>>
>> On 2006 Sep 18 , at 17:39, Jeff Cross wrote:
>>
>>> Adam Martin wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 2006 Sep 18 , at 16:25, Jeff Cross wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I am trying to run FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE on a Dell PowerEdge 850 with
>>>>> some
>>>>> booting issues.  I have searched the archives and found someone
>>>>> having a
>>>>> problem with the machine "booting too fast" but my problem is a little
>>>>> different.  My machine hangs up after the following line is displayed
>>>>> during boot:
>>>>>
>>>>> acd0: CDROM <TEAC CD-ROM CD-224E-N/3.AB> at ata0-master UDMA33
>>
>> [ Trimmed for brevity ]
> 
>     Sorry to double reply, Jeff.  I just realized something.  The box
> that I've been developing AutoFS on, here at FSL is a Dell Power Edge SE
> 1425.  I dunno how much hardware there is in common, but I think we use
> the same cdrom drive.  The one in my PE is a thin-profile drive...  it
> seems to be the exact part that I had in an old Dell Inspiron.  (The
> drive has no tray motors, just an electro-mechanical latch which keeps
> it closed, and unlocks to let a spring pop out the tray by a few
> millimetres.)
> 
>     Have you tried removing the cdrom drive from the mainboard?  Also
> how did you install, from CDROM?  I have seen an issue like this once
> before, back in 5.2.1 and 5.3, when trying to get it to boot on some
> older laptop hardware.  The kernel wouldn't boot from some media, but
> would from others.
> 
>     You may want to try someone's custom compiled kernel, not the stock
> kernels...  But at this point, it is beyond the scope of a simple fix. 
> I am curious to know, however, because I have not seen this behavior.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> -- 
> Adam David Alan Martin
> 
> 
> 
> 
The CD-ROM you described is exactly what is in the PE850.  I haven't
tried unplugging it from the motherboard but will give that a try today.

I installed from the CD and everything went as expected.  My only issue
is that I _have_ to use verbose logging at boot in order to get it to
come up.  Strange...

Jeff Cross
http://www.averageadmins.com/