Installing 6.2-BETA3 from floppies

[Eugene Grosbein]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 03:43:41PM +0700, Eugene Grosbein wrote:

> > I've prepared 4 floppy disks and tried to boot from floppies.
> > It successfully loads kernel and acpi.ko and shows menu
> > formerly known as 'Beastie' (now draws 'FreeBSD' instead of Chuck).
> > The menu shows that FreeBSD detects that this system does not
> > have ACPI and will boot without ACPI support enabled.
> > 
> > However, timer does not 'tick' and there is always 10 seconds left.
> > I choose verbose mode, it starts to show its diagnostic output
> > but last line it shows is 'Calibrating clocks...' then it halts:
> > keyboard leds do not switch, there is no reaction on 'Ctrl-Alt-ESC'.
> 
> Hmm, I was too quick... The kernel has spent lots of minutes
> 'sitting in this pose' but suddenly said that clock calibration
> has failed and it will use default frequency. Then it booted Ok
> and I've installed the system to HDD using 6.1-RELEASE (I do not
> have complete 6.2-BETA3 CD here but plan to do binary upgrade
> over FTP).
> 
> When installation process was finished, it rebooted from HDD
> but it now it sits again at the same stage trying to calibrate clock,
> 5 minutes are gone already. So the question is what should I do
> to skip this stage and have accurate timers still.

I've rebuild kernel without any CALIBRATE_XXX options
but it still tries to calibrate clock and hangs for 15 minutes exactly
then proceedes to probe devices and boots Ok.

When I first booted this old machine its BIOS said that Date/Time in CMOS
are corrupted and asked to press F1 to enter SETUP to fix this
or press ESC to continue booting. Enterins SETUP and correcting
settings does not help and BIOS complains again that Date/Time are wrong
and does not proceed without a key is pressed on keyboard.
That's not suitable for small standalone router so I went to the store,
bought Duracell DL2032 3V battary and replaced old
Panasonic CD2032 3V battary. That satisfied BIOS POST and it no more
complains about Date/Time. But FreeBSD spends 15 minutes to calibrate clock.

Now I've put back old Panasonic CD2032 3V and hey, BIOS complains again
but FreeBSD boots normally and completes clock calibration very quickly.

I wonder, how new battery may affect clock calibration routines
and why old bad battery does not affect it that way?

Eugene Grosbein