5.4 fails to find boot drive, then panics.

[Doug White]

On Wed, 29 Jun 2005, Mike Meyer wrote:

> In <20050628232828.G3088 at carver.gumbysoft.com>, Doug White <dwhite at gumbysoft.com> typed:
> > On Fri, 24 Jun 2005, Mike Meyer wrote:
> >
> > > I'm trying to install 5.4-RELEASE off of CDROM on an ASUS P5S800 motherboard
> > > with a SATA drive in it. The SATA drive shows up as ad4 during the install
> > > process, and the install goes just fine.
> > >
> > > But the resulting system fails to boot. It goes through the boot sequence,
> > > draws the cute 5.x booto menu, then issues the messages:
> > >
> > > Can't work out which disk we are booting from.
> > > Guessed BIOS device 0xffffffff not found by probes, defaulting to disk0:
> > >
> > > panic: free: guard1 fail @0x5195c from /usr/src/sys/boot/i386/loader/../../common/module.c:957
> > > --> Press a key on the console to reboot <--
> > >
> > > Booting with debug messages doesn't change this at all.
> >
> > This is in the loader. Your machine is seriously messed up. I'd suggest
> > checking for a BIOS update. Also try rearranging your ATA channels and
> > disabling DMA mode for the ATA controllers in the BIOS setup.
>
> I figured that out. Since writing the original message, I managed to
> get the thing (mostly) working by hacking the loader to wire down the
> values for the boot drive rather than having it probe for them.
>
> > Unfortunately ASUS boards of this type are known to have braindamaged
> > ACPI, so this is only the beginning of a long, painful journey. :(
>
> How far does turning off ACPI in the BIOS go towards solving these
> problems? I'd be surprised if it does much, if anything.

Reportedly, the machine doesn't boot.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite at gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org