One more 2300 healthy (rats?)

[Doug Ledford]

Robert G. Brown wrote:

> Anyway, the 9/19 cam boot.flp image booted my "sick" PowerEdge 2300,
> found the 7890 device, and I could have proceeded to install freebsd if
> I had any idea how to install freebsd from just one floppy.  It also
> rewrote whatever internal register was causing the trouble, as
> 5.1.0pre10 booted flawlessly immediately thereafter.  I have to confess
> that I'm amazed that there is something that critical to function that
> isn't cleared by a power cycle (including one where I jumpered NVRAM
> clear and pulled the plug and punched the power button and...), but
> there it is.

Now, the next real question is, if you go ahead and power that system down,
unplug the cord, discharge the capacitors in the power supply, clear the
NVRAM, and do everything else you cna imagine to make that system go back to
original, will the pre10 boot up without first booting the FreeBSD-CAM
floppy?  If so, then I'm stumped and amazed.  To the best of my knowledge,
everything the FreeBSD ahc cam driver sets and everything the linux aic7xxx
driver set are *all* volatile registers and locations in the sense that they
go away with a power down.  So, if the machine is "fixed" so to speak now
and no longer needs pre-booted after a power down to get pre10 to work, then
something weird is going on.  Any clues what it might be in that case
Justin?

> So, Doug, I think that you are probably correct about something not
> getting written to, if only to clear it and get its parity right, during
> the initialization phase.  Unfortunately (;-) I'm now down to just ONE
> system that is exhibiting the problem.  Presumably I could fix it by
> booting freebsd (well, not FIX it exactly as it has a hard memory error
> showing up too, but clear whatever is ailing the SCSI controller).  If
> you like, I will try to hold onto this system for a few days without
> doing so until you see if you can reproduce the error on something
> there.  If nothing else, I can be a final test site for whatever
> solution you come up with in pre11.

Yeah, don't "fix" that machine just yet :)  If you can, run the test above
first.

-- 

 Doug Ledford  <dledford at dialnet.net>
  Opinions expressed are my own, but
     they should be everybody's.

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo at FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-aic7xxx" in the body of the message