BSD 6 or 7 + Intel 3200 MCH chipset

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 06:19:00PM -0700, Dave Overton wrote:
> Just put together a nice 1U box, Tyan Tank GT20, plugged in its 8gb ECC RAM,
> its 4 shiney new HDs and fired it up.  Bios looks normal, reset the clock to
> something resembling today, and throw in the Fbsd7 disk!
> 
> No joy. 
> 
> I get just a hint of a "booting" line, then an instant reboot, or with a 6
> disk, I get a scrolling mess that I have no idea what it says.

Sounds like bootloader/BTX problems.  The "scrolling mess" is probably a
register dump; another common one is a sporadic reboot, case in point.

Don't let the 2nd thread below make you think "USB pen drives have
nothing to do with my server"; BTX is used everywhere:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2008-March/041272.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2008-March/041112.html

John Baldwin just recently committed some fixes in this regard, to both
CURRENT, RELENG_6, and RELENG_7, which might fix the problem you're
seeing.  No promises though.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/boot/i386/btx/btx/

The commit to CURRENT was done on March 10th.
The commit to RELENG_7 was done on March 18th.
The commit to RELENG_6 was done on March 18th.

I'd recommend trying out one of the snapshot ISOs, except that all of
the ISOs are from March 11th, which means the only images which *might*
have the fixes applied are for CURRENT.

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/200803/

If you're feeling spunky, I'd try the CURRENT bootonly snapshot solely
to see if it boots for you.  I would NOT recommend installing CURRENT on
your brand new production server.  :-)

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/200803/8.0-CURRENT-200803-amd64-bootonly.iso

I can't guarantee that the ISO will fix the problem for you; it's
possible the ISO was made based on code from prior to March 10th, and
it's also possible the problem you're having are unrelated to the the
fixes John did.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                    jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                           http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                  PGP: 4BD6C0CB |