BTX halted when installing on a HP Proliant DL360 G3

[David Landgren]

David Landgren wrote:

Replying to myself, for the sake of the archives.

> List,
> 
> I just received a new batch of servers to deploy. Among the lot I have 3 
> HP Proliant DL360 G3 servers that refuse to run the installation CD. I 
> think this is because HP have switched to Ultra 320 drives and I don't 
> think FreeBSD has caught up with that. I have two 18Gb 15000rpm drives 
> mounted in RAID-1.
> 
> The BIOS says "Proliant System BIOS - P31 (03/01/2003)".
> 
> I've tried various BIOS options, but the boot always goes like this:
> 
> Miniboot 4.1
> Attempting Boot From CD-ROM
> CD Loader 1.01
> 
> Building the boot loader arguments
> Lookup up /BOOT/LOADER... Found
> Relocating the loader and the BTX
> Starting the BTX loader
> 
> BTX Loader 1.00  BTX version is 1.01
> Console: internal video/keyboard
> BIOS CD is cd0
> BIOS drive A: is disk0
> 
> inf=0000000d err=00000000 efl=00030006
> ...
> BTX halted
> 
> I.e.: it looks like it's when it hunts for hard disks.
> 
> I trawled the archives and learnt that people had similar problems on 
> Compaq hardware, although with Adaptec controllers. The solution there 
> was to create a DOS partition on the disk beforehand. I tried this, with 
> no success.
> 
> I've tried booting from 4.8-RELEASE, 5.1-RELEASE and the 5.1 miniloader, 
> all with similar results. I also tried booting of an OpenBSD 3.3 CD. It 
> gets a bit further, but when it comes to choosing I for Install, it 
> reports that there are no hard disks available.
> 
> It seems like FreeBSD simply hasn't caught up yet. I had a look at the 
> Testdrive machines offered by HP, but they're still running 4.8 on a 
> DL360 G2.
> 
> If anyone has some idea as to how to proceed, I'd be really grateful. 
> The only alternative would be to try and install Linux. But I've been 
> unhappy with Linux performance under load in the past (and it's these 
> servers I'm replacing) so it would be sad to continue in that vein.
> 
> Thanks for the clues,

Daisuke Koike got me onto the right track by pointing me to 
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=61247+63991+/usr/local/www/db/text/2003/freebsd-stable/20030525.freebsd-stable

The thread there talks about disabling a BIOS setting named "Virtual 
boot device". Unfortunately my BIOS doesn't have that option. I had 
another look, and found a different option named "Virtual install 
disk" and this one was enabled. I set it to disabled, rebooted, and 
FreeBSD booted successfully from the CD-ROM. Hope this helps someone 
in the future.

Thanks again Daisuke-san.

David