Dell E521 won't boot FreeBSD

Joel Bradbury joel at its.washington.edu
Thu Oct 5 12:42:49 PDT 2006


Well, it seemed like a good deal -- the new Dell E521 with an AMD 64 Athlon 
3200+,  1Gb memory, for $400 should make a decent, cheap server.  But 
FreeBSD just won't boot on it.  I tried Release 6.1 (both amd64 and i386 
versions), as well as Releases 5.5 and 4.11.  All give the same result when 
trying to boot from the install cd:

	With the usb keyboard plugged in, the boot gets to a "panic: 
ohci-add-done: addr 0x3bef1ba0 not found", and then it tries to reboot again.
	With the keyboard unplugged, the ohci error never appears, but the boot 
gets to a point of recognizing the SATA drive, and then just hangs.  Last 
message: "ad4: 152587MB <SAMSUNG HD160JJ/P ZM100-34> at ata2-master SATA300"

Anyone have any ideas of anything to try?  There's not much to change in 
the BIOS settings.
Btw, the BIOS is version 1.0.1 (9/23/2006).  The only version currently 
available on the Dell site is version 1.0.0 (!).

Linux boots and runs fine.  I guess I may have to go with that.



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