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

[Randi Harper]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Rich <rl001 at pacbell.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Dave <dave at g8kbv.demon.co.uk>
> To: Bruce Cran <bruce at cran.org.uk>
> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Sent: Wed, July 21, 2010 3:56:50 AM
> Subject: Re: system hangs on; "Probing devices, please wait (this can take a
> while)... "
>
> On 20 Jul 2010 at 23:46, Bruce Cran wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:59:04 -0700 (PDT)
>> Rich <rl001 at pacbell.net> wrote:
>>
>> > Any ideas anyone ? I'm stuck. Cannot install FreeBSD on my computer.
>> > Every other OS besides FreeBSD boots up and installs. What else can
>> > I check?
>>
>> It looks like it's stopping/spinning at the section where it parses
>> the slices/partitions. I don't know why it would be getting stuck
>> there, though.
>>
>
> Maybe because there might be old RAID metadata from being in one of those stupid
> "fakeraids".  I had this problem last year and somehow (can't remember) wiped
> the drives and got it working. The system worked for about a year then crashed.
> I thought it a good time to move to 9.0 but now having the same problem again. I
> didn't put them back in the fakeraid. From what I understand FreeBSD can't be
> installed on those fakeraids. Maybe it has something to do with that.
>
>
>
>> --
>> Bruce Cran
>>
>
> Hi, I'm not a developer (of OS's at least) but from that DEBUG:
> list, it almost looks like it thinks it can see just about every
> hardware device it knows about, existing or not, and is trying to
> use them all.
>
> I know someone mentioned memory tests, but I didn't see what results
> they came up with, or how much memory you have.  I do know however
> from my own frustrating experience in the past, that often some
> software will run just fine on bad memory, if the problems don't
> screw up the code or it's workspace.  Where as other software will
> crash badly, making you think the program is bad.   The same is
> sadly true of hard disk errors too!
>
> Did you run a recent memtest86 (self boot CD) and let it do several
> "Full" passes (can take many many hours per pass if you have lots of
> ram!  And or a not so fast CPU) ?
>
> Just idle musings.
>
> Dave B.
>
> No I didn't run a mem test since every other OS works perfectly fine. There's
> something in the FreeBSD code that is hanging. When it hangs it says "Probing
> devices (this may take a while)". What does "a while" mean? A few seconds? few
> hours? few days? That's a really dumb message IMHO.
>
>
>
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>

It's not a memory problem. I've never seen this before. I'll see if I
can take a look at the code tonight (I'm at work right now) and figure
out why you might be getting this. Clearly doing a minimal install (as
some have suggested) isn't going to work because you don't even get to
the menu. I know *what* the code is doing - and this is actually
something we're getting rid of soon. This was written before devfs was
implemented, so it is going through looking for every possible device.
I'm just not sure what order it does it in off the top of my head, so
I don't know what comes after the scan for SCSI disks, as it's clearly
getting through that part just fine. Hmmm.

-- randi