Mac mini - FreeBSD on external HD - problems

Torfinn Ingolfsen torfinn.ingolfsen at broadpark.no
Tue Jul 5 22:55:06 GMT 2005


I have just purchased myself a Mac mini. It is the 1.42GHz model, with
1GB RAM, 80GB hard drive, Superdrive (or DVD burner for us Mac newbies),
Airport Extreme (wireless), and Bluetooth.

Having lurked in the archives of the freebsd-ppc mailing list, I just
couldn't resist the temptation to try to install FreeBSD on it. I had a
spare 60GB hard drive and an external firewire enclosure lying about, so
the easiest way would be to install on the external drive.
I assembled the drive, connected it to the mini, and used Disk Utility
in OS X to partition in in two unix format partitions; one 2GB for
swap, and the rest (about 53GB) for FreeBSD. The partitions are working,
and Disk Utility verifies them as ok. Note: the external firewire case
has a power supply; I'm using that, even if I don't know if it is
required.

I followed Dario Freni's install howto (thanks), managed to get the hint
about bluetooth keyboards from the list ('set hint.pcib.1.skipslot=26'
in the FreeBSD boot loader) and got the machine to boot from the install
CD.
However, instead of the firewire disk probing correctly, I get a lot of
SCSI error messages (hand copied, beware of errors):
(probe0:sbp0:0:0:0): INQUIRY. CDB: 12 0 0 0 24 0
(probe0:sbp0:0:0:0): CAM Status: SCSI Status Error
(probe0:sbp0:0:0:0): SCSI Status: check Condition
(probe0:sbp0:0:0:0): NOT READY csi:de,ad,c0,de asc:5e,0
(probe0:sbp0:0:0:0): Low Power Condition on
(probe0:sbp0:0:0:0): Retrying Command (per Sense Data)
     :                              :              :
(probe0:sbp0:0:0:0): Retries Exhausted
and then it stops.
Is there anything I can do about this, except getting another disk?
I mean, the disk works fine in OS X, why is FreeBSD picky about it?
-- 
Regards,
Torfinn Ingolfsen,
Norway



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