problem booting 5.2.1

whizzter at acidjazz.net whizzter at acidjazz.net
Thu Apr 15 08:35:38 PDT 2004


(sorry for reposting this but i guess freebsd-bugs was the wrong place)

i've installed 5.2.1 and after creating a new fat32 partition on the
same disk it stopped booting, however as i had problems during the
install i hope the description here should help narrow it down.

---------
when i got the computer i had 2 preformatted fat32 partitions, so
before installing i destroyed the second one and created a new smaller
one so i could fit freebsd on a new.

i started the installer and got created a partition and selected the
boot manager, however when doing commit the installer complained about
not being able to create/use a node named something in the lines of
ad1s3.. (my guess is that there was no device present for the 3rd
partition).

i went back into XP and removed the second partition from there.

after that the installer (kern/mfsroot floppies) refused to boot. after
trying some things i was able to get the installer to start again by
recreating the second partition i had when i did my first try.

this time i deleted the second partition from within the installer and
after that i was able to successfully install fbsd on a second
partition (kinda confirms my suspicion about the installer, it might
just be that a few nodes is missing from the mfsroot maybe?)

having installed i was successful in booting both xp and fbsd. but i
had 12 gigs of unused space after the bsd partition so i created a new
fat32 drive from within xp, after doing that fbsd stopped booting.

trying to boot the installer again gave the same error i had before
with it hanging during boot.

the UFS2 partition is still intact as i can access it thru the
bootloader, using show and lsmod from within the bootloader also shows
that it's trying to use the correct root.

the hanging kernel pops up in slightly different places depending on if
i try to boot the installer or the installed kernel. but roughly in the
same place during device initialization, the installer kernel hangs
after some pci_cfgintr line and the installed one hangs after
displaying something about the agp bus (setting the verbose flag while
booting shows the kernel saying setting "setting gatt size to 256mb".
however i guess that these lines are unrelated as i was able to install
the kernel and even start Xfree. and that the problems has been
connected to me changing the partition layout. but i hope that you can
somewhat guess where the kernel gets stuck.

the kernel approximately displays around 15-20 lines of output before
hanging.

Thanks in advance.

/ Jonas Lund






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