Freeze During Boot With 6.2-RELEASE Install Disk

[illoai at gmail.com]

On 20/07/07, alex at schnarff.com <alex at schnarff.com> wrote:
> I've got a machine that I'm trying to get 6.2-RELEASE installed on, in
> order to act as a backup/test config server for a production box I have
> running the same version of FreeBSD. The machine previously had
> 5.3-RELEASE on a single SCSI disk, with a 4-drive SATA RAID that wasn't
> quite working right (according to the previous owner; I just got the
> system a few days ago); unfortunately, the system now refuses to
> recognize the SCSI disk, even in the Adaptec SCSI card's BIOS.
>
> That said, when I pop in my 6.2-RELEASE boot disk, it comes up, loads
> devices, sees the SATA RAID...and then just hangs. I've tried booting
> in safe mode and with verbose logging...and it won't work either way,
> and I get no error messages.
>
> FWIW, I took the same boot CD and popped it into an Acer laptop I had
> handy, and it went straight into the system setup menus, asking me to
> choose a country; so the CD itself seems unlikely to be the culprit.
> Additionally, I popped an OpenBSD 3.9 boot CD into the freezing
> machine, and it came right up to an install prompt -- though it saw the
> SATA disks as individual entities, and not a RAID.
>
> Does anyone have any clue what might be causing this, and/or how to
> solve it? I'll be happy to provide additional details, I'm just not
> sure what would be helpful right now.
>

Does the machine still boot 5.3, or does the line:
> the system now refuses to recognize the SCSI disk,
> even in the Adaptec SCSI card's BIOS.
mean that the drive/controller is actually mussed up?

If you can boot 5.3, it would be very helpful to see a dmesg
from that.  If not, it might still be somewhat enlightening to
see where the 6.2 bootup stops, if you can capture that.

If the SCSI drive or controller really has gone south in
some fun, horrible way, you might try physically removing
them, as a malfunctioning controller can cause a rather
long* pause in the disk-probing sequence.

If you have already removed the SCSI stuff and the 6.2
disk still hangs after the SATA probe and you can't find
any way to capture the output, you might try posting the
make and model, as there are some dreadful pieces of
garbage out there that FreeBSD has some difficulty with.



* Potentially limited only by how long your machine continues
to have power connected.

NB:  In my experience OpenBSD is much better at
playing fast&loose with garbage hardware than
FreeBSD.  Whether this is a good thing I would not
hazard to guess.

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