5.4 fails to find boot drive, then panics.

[Doug White]

On Fri, 24 Jun 2005, Mike Meyer wrote:

> I'm trying to install 5.4-RELEASE off of CDROM on an ASUS P5S800 motherboard
> with a SATA drive in it. The SATA drive shows up as ad4 during the install
> process, and the install goes just fine.
>
> But the resulting system fails to boot. It goes through the boot sequence,
> draws the cute 5.x booto menu, then issues the messages:
>
> Can't work out which disk we are booting from.
> Guessed BIOS device 0xffffffff not found by probes, defaulting to disk0:
>
> panic: free: guard1 fail @0x5195c from /usr/src/sys/boot/i386/loader/../../common/module.c:957
> --> Press a key on the console to reboot <--
>
> Booting with debug messages doesn't change this at all.

This is in the loader. Your machine is seriously messed up. I'd suggest
checking for a BIOS update. Also try rearranging your ATA channels and
disabling DMA mode for the ATA controllers in the BIOS setup.

Unfortunately ASUS boards of this type are known to have braindamaged
ACPI, so this is only the beginning of a long, painful journey. :(

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite at gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org