FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE boot failure

[Doug White]

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, ALeine wrote:

> Doug White wrote:
>
> > Hm... we'll need to disassemble the code there, but typically
> > these types of crashes are caused by BIOS bugs. Try upgrading
> > your BIOS.
>
> When I try to boot directly the machine reboots too quickly for
> me to be able to catch the error message. The register dump is
> from VMWare trying to boot the said FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE as guest
> OS using the mentioned disk in raw disk mode on a friend's
> machine. FreeBSD 4.10-STABLE runs just fine that way on his
> system. This makes me think it might not be BIOS related.

Well VMware isn't the same hardware so thats a totally unrelated problem
:)

I'd suggest setting up a serial console and capturing the output that way.
Connect another machine via null-modem cable to COM1 on the crashing
system. At the first spinning bar hit a key and you'll get a boot: prompt.
At that prompt enter "-h" and press Return and that should cause the
loader (and the error output) to go to the serial port.

> > What brand/model machine is this?
>
> i386, Athlon XP CPU, Chaintech 7SID (Sis 735 chipset) motherboard
> with the latest official BIOS.

So something fairly recent ... hm.

> > Other things you might try:
> >
> > . Turn off 'Legacy USB' if you don't have a USB keyboard
> > . Disable DMA on IDE disks (Known issue on older compaqs)
>
> I've tried it with USB on and off, it makes no difference.
> I'll look into the DMA issue. Thanks for your quick reply.
>
>
> ALeine
> ___________________________________________________________________
> WebMail FREE http://mail.austrosearch.net
>

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