Suggestions for PII 400 boot failure

[Chris Pratt]

On Nov 20, 2008, at 4:31 PM, Vinny wrote:

> Hi,
>
> A friend of mine is trying out FreeBSD and ran into
> a booting problem.  Here is his message:
>
> "Well, that's discouraging.
>
> I have put together an old PII 400 with  three 20GB drives and a  
> CDROM that I'd like to run BSD on.  Half a GB of RAM I figured  
> would be respectable.
>
> Downloaded the ISO files, burned CDs of them and when I try to run  
> them it starts to boot and then freezes tighter than a muskrat's arse.
>
> Three lines coming on the screen and it ends with "Starting the_"  
> and just hangs.
>
He might want to try downloading the floppy set and booting
from there. I think that is what I did on an old Dell 200 I'm
using as a bridging firewall at home. This is a pathetically old
machine and won't boot the ISO (I found it when cleaning out
my rental, left to throw away by the renter), but it works great
once you finally get the system on it. It's on 6.2 but I imagine
7.0 will be fine.

FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p3 #3: Mon Apr  9 09:11:48 UTC 2007
     ----snip----
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
CPU: Pentium/P55C (199.43-MHz 586-class CPU)
   Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x544  Stepping = 4
   Features=0x8001bf<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,MCE,CX8,MMX>
real memory  = 100663296 (96 MB)
avail memory = 93102080 (88 MB)
Intel Pentium detected, installing workaround for F00F bug


> I've got a PIII 1000 here that I use as a file server and the boot  
> disks run fine on that.  Just won't boot off the PII 400.
>
> Weird.  Really, really weird.  I tried five different CDROMs in  
> case it was the actual drive but same thing.  I tried using version  
> 6.3 instead of release 7.0 and same thing.
>
> That system doesn't like BSD/Linux whatever.
>
> I use GParted as a partition manager all the time which is bootable  
> and same thing on that machine.  It just don't like booting to that  
> OS."
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Thanks
> Vinny
>
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