Fwd: Can't boot 8.0-BETA4 from USB stick

[Randi Harper]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 3:22 PM, James Butler <sweetnavelorange at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/9/11 Randi Harper <randi at freebsd.org>:
> > On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 2:48 PM, James Butler <
> sweetnavelorange at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> 2009/9/10 Hans Petter Selasky <hselasky at c2i.net>:
> >> > On Thursday 10 September 2009 06:37:13 James Butler wrote:
> >> >> Is there anything else worth trying?
> >> >
> >> > Another brand of memory sticks?
> >>
> >> I have only the three different brands that I tried (Toshiba and two
> >> different no-names). Is there really nothing like an adjustable delay
> >> at boot? Perhaps it's time to spend NZD$30 on a CF card and IDE
> >> adapter, but that will be of limited use for troubleshooting or
> >> installation.
> >>
> >> -James
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> freebsd-current at freebsd.org mailing list
> >> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current
> >> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "
> freebsd-current-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
> >
> > I've been asking around about an option to delay before mounting root as
> > well. I don't know of anything off the top of my head, but it sounds to
> me
> > like a bug (or at least a reasonable feature request). Send a PR?
>
> I probably will now, I just wanted to exhaust the existing options. It
> seems to me that a "wait for the configured root device to appear"
> timeout could be arbitrarily long (eg. 10+ secs) by default without
> adversely affecting the normal use case, but I don't claim to know how
> the boot process works.
>
> > Have you only tried this on the one computer? It seems suspicious that
> all
> > the cards are having this problem when I've only heard of two cases of
> USB
> > flash-slowness causing problems so far. I'm curious to see if you have
> the
> > same problem using that flash disk with a different computer.
>
> I think I used the same drive to test-install 8.0-BETA1 on my old
> Thinkpad X31, which seemed to work OK. This Asus motherboard is a but
> useless in other ways; still, 7.2 runs fine.
>
> -James
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-current at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-current-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>

To avoid adversely affecting the normal use case, a tunable could specify
the option of having the mount wait until the device appears, or possibly
for how long to delay the mount. This really isn't my area of expertise,
though, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Not sure if you've seen these, but this is a problem other people are
reporting as well:

Relevant but not enlightening:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2009-May/007457.html
Slightly more helpful:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2009-August/010562.html

Not all that relevant, but interesting anyways:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2009-July/009912.html

-- randi