system hangs on; "Probing devices, please wait (this can take a while)... "

[Rich]

Disks are not bad. Works with other OSes. Problem is with FreeBSD. I've tried 
versions 4.6, 7.2, 8.0 and 9.0. Only FreeBSD 4.6 boots without hanging. I've not 
tried 5 or 6 but I guess I could if it would help to narrow down what the 
changes were in those versions. Something obviously changed along the way to 
cause it to hang.


From: Randi Harper <randi at freebsd.org>
To: Bruce Cran <bruce at cran.org.uk>
Cc: Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com>; FreeBSD - <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>; 
Rich <rl001 at pacbell.net>
Sent: Mon, July 19, 2010 11:19:06 PM
Subject: Re: system hangs on; "Probing devices, please wait (this can take a  
while)... "

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 11:09 PM, Bruce Cran <bruce at cran.org.uk> wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:17:06 -0700
> Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
>
>> There's not quite enough information here to identify your
>> motherboard, but you should make sure there aren't any BIOS upgrades
>> available for it, as those might help resolve this level of issue.
>>
>> Check your BIOS config for the disks carefully, and try adjusting the
>> options you have.  In particular, try choosing LBA mode rather than
>> auto or CHS, and try to toggle through "ACPI (or SATA mode)" vs. "IDE
>> (or PATA compatibility)" vs. "enhanced (often meaning some form of
>> BIOS RAID is enabled)" and see whether any of them work.
>>
>> If that doesn't do the trick, you could wander through your BIOS
>> menus, and disable all of the non-essential stuff like parallel &
>> serial ports, second NIC, or anything else which is not needed, and
>> see whether that does any good...but that's getting into stuff which
>> is less likely to make a difference.
>
>
> The code that's being run does the following:
>
> 1. Finds all network interfaces.
> 2. Finds all CDROM, floppy, disk and network devices that might be
> needed for installation.
> 3. Finds all partitions on the disks to register.
>
> I'd guess it's hanging on a syscall somewhere, but there really isn't
> much debugging output in usr.sbin/sysinstall/devices.c to know where,
> unless the kernel has printed some errors to the debug console.
>
> --
> Bruce Cran
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>

This is why I suspected #3 - maybe querying the disk and hanging
because of bad disk? Hard to say without debug logs.

-- randi