issues booting 5.3 w/ A7N8X Deluxe

[nick holley]

On Sat, 6 Nov 2004 16:58:45 -0700, nick holley <nick.holley at gmail.com> wrote:
> I downloaded the 5.3 bootonly disc this morning and was unable to
> boot. I had the same problem that I experienced with the 5.3-RC2 and
> also when I did a buildworld from 5.2.1. The kernel appears to be
> booting fine until it gets to a certain point where it will stop. The
> boot process stops right after listing my hdds or, if my orinoco card
> is in, after failing to initialize my wireless nic (which happens
> right after the hdd listing).
> 
> The system is not locked as I still receive a message about not being
> ready to suspend from the acpi module when I push the power button on
> my tower. Also, it doesn't matter which boot option I use; the boot
> stops at the same place every time.
> 
> Can anybody give me any pointers on how to go about diagnosing the problem here?
> 
> Thanks,
> Nick
> 

As I noticed that a few others had this problem with the 5.3 betas, I
figured I might post the solution I found. Someone on a newsgroup
advised me to disable firewire in the bios and after spending alot of
time on this it finally works.

Just to clarify, this was an Asus A7N8X Deluxe rev 2.0 w/ bios 1008
(just updated today). I think the boot process was stalling after
completing device detection and just before mounting the filesystems.

Hope this helps someone,
Nick