A big-ish machine, cannot boot

[Ivan Voras]

On 19 November 2010 18:17, James R. Van Artsdalen
<james-freebsd-current at jrv.org> wrote:
> Ivan Voras wrote:
>> Unfortunately, the kernel hangs on boot. The loader finishes, the twirly
>> starts spinning but then hangs. Enabling verbose booting results in
>> nothing new - no kernel messages at all.
>
> I don't think "loader finishes" is correct.  Can you break to the loader
> command line at the beastie menu?

Yes. Everything in the loader itself works fine, including hardware detection.

> At the time of the twirlie I think that the loader is copying the kernel
> to memory.  Perhaps it is having trouble with disk reads, or has a bad
> memory map.
>
> How many disks are attached, and what filesystem type does /boot live
> on?  And  what does Fixit mode see (from whatever installed that system)?

There are three RAID volumes visible to the system, and all three are
successfully detected and used.

root and /boot are completely standard UFS.

It is "legacy free" hardware in the sense that it doesn't have PS2
ports, and has the latest generation CPUs with a whole bunch of new
technologies.