ASUS V9400 video card prevents FreeBSD from booting

[Vulpes Velox]

On Thu, 14 Apr 2005 22:14:53 -0500
"Jordon Hofer" <bsdlist at sirjorj.com> wrote:

> Greetings.  I recently discovered why FreeBSD quit working on my
> computer. When I replaced my GeForce 2 MX400 with a GeForce MX
> 4000-based card from ASUS (The X Series V9400 with 64 meg of RAM),
> FreeBSD no longer boots.  For what it's worth, the contents of my
> computer are as follows:
> 
> Dual P3-1.4 Tualatin procs in a TYAN mobo
> 1 gig RAM
> Adaptec 39160
>   -9 gig Cheetah (Windows 2k install)
>   -18 gig Cheetah (NTFS)
>   -4 gig UltraStar (i dont even remember whats on this one...)
>   -Plextor CDRW
>   -Zip Drive
> Built-in IDE controller
>   -40 gig Maxtor (this drive is for FreeBSD)
>   -Plextor DVDRW
> SB Audigy
> Netgear NIC
> Belkin USB2.0 card
> 
> ***
> 
> The long story is that I had FreeBSD 5.3 on the 40 gig drive from an
> install/update/rebuild I did a while back.  My dual-boot setup is
> pretty unique in that I either have the 40 gig drive plugged in or I
> have the SCSI drives plugged in to keep the two systems isolated.  I
> gave DragonflyBSD a try recently and found that it wouldd hang
> during the boot sequence.  I then tried booting the BSD install I
> already had and found that it hung too.  I tried booting the 5.3
> install CD and got the same results.  After lots of testing,
> including pulling out all hardware that wasnt essential to boot, I
> finally remembered that I had recently replaced video cards in favor
> of one with DVI support for my new LCD monitor.  After I put the old
> video card back in, the 5.3 cd booted just fine.  I just tried
> booting 4.11 (from a real BSDmall-purchased, honest-to-goodness,
> ours-goes-to-eleven cd and dvd) and got the same results.
> 
> I really dont know how to proceed from here.  If there is any other
> trick or way to get info to help the developers recognize this
> hardware and/or what is causing it to crash the system, I'm willing
> to help.
> 
> ***
> 
> Other interesting things I noticed:
> 
>  -Both win2k and bsd5.3 seem to see a firewire adapter on this video
>  card
> even though there is no firewire connector on it.
> 
>  -I got halfway through typing out this email last week when win2k
>  took a
> huge dump and the only thing saving me from a reinstall was SpinRite
> 6.
> 
>  -Yes, I did try booting 5.3 with different options from the menu:
>  verbose
> mode, ACPI, etc...  When in non-verbose mode, the last thing I saw
> was the waiting 15 sec for SCSI devices message.  In verbose mode, I
> saw a few messages beyond that.

Bad video card maybe? That seems like a reasonable explanation if
both windows and freebsd are finding a firewire adapter on it when
there is not. If two different OSes with known good drivers for a
piece of hardware don't work, I would say the hardware is bad.