GEOM related panic during install

Ivan Voras ivoras at freebsd.org
Wed Feb 13 02:18:19 PST 2008


Damian Wiest wrote:

> I believe that the panic occurs while geom is tasting the system's disks.
> AFAIK, the disks were new, but someone here had configured the BIOS to 
> use the onboard soft-RAID controller to mirror the drives.  I disabled 
> this setting before beginning the install, so I suspect that's how the 
> label on ad6 got messed up.
> 
> What's the proper way of recovering from this situation?  I can't simply
> pull the offending disk, boot into FreeBSD, reinsert the disk and then
> use dd to zero the label because x86/amd64 servers won't notice the new 
> disk.  I ended up using a Solaris install CD to write a new label to each
> disk, but I suppose I could build a custom kernel that does not contain
> any of the geom modules and use that as a fixit disk.  Do I just need
> to use boot option 6 and then have the loader unload any modules?

The problem here is that even if you do remove optional GEOM
modules/classes from the kernel, you'll still be left with the GEOM
framework which does the initial tasting, which you can't remove because
it's the kernel's interface to the drives. Also, the "Intel check1
failed" messages are from the ATA driver, as it tries to recognize
BIOS/soft-raid configurations, and you can't remove that. It (the ATA
driver) is also the probable cause of the panic here.

It would be useful if you tried to debug the problem in the driver - try
and download a recent snapshot of 8-current, with debugging enabled, and
see if you can get a backtrace on panic which would help fix the driver.

Other than that, you'll probably have to boot another OS (Linux,
Solaris, etc.) and use dd to clear the first few and the last few
sectors of the drives.

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