Cant boot 9-RELEASE on Intel L440GX+ based system

[Sergey Listopad]

2012/8/3 jb <jb.1234abcd at gmail.com>:
> Sergey Listopad <psychosensor <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
>>
>> Hi.
>>
>> I try to boot topic on retro dual PIII Intel L440GX+ based system. It
>> is onboard AIC-7896 SCSI controller with 1 COMPAQ HDD. CDROM is IDE.
>> When I try boot from installation CD, boot stuck on
>>
>> CD Loader 1.2
>> ...
>> BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.02
>> Consoles: internal video/keyboard
>> BIOS CD is cd0
>> BIOS drive A: is disk0
>>
>> If I remove HDD, system (/boot/loader) boot from CD just fine. Then I
>> insert HDD (hotswap) and able to install on it. But after reboot (with
>> installation CD disk removed from drive) system unable to boot. And
>> stuck on the same place, after
>> ...
>> BIOS drive A: is disk0
>>
>> Maybe anybody can help me to resolve this issue. I can post any
>> additional information which may be helpful.
>>
>> Thanx.
>>
>
> This has been reported for FreeBSD and PC-BSD for quite some time.
>
> The booting sequence always looks like this:
> ...
> BIOS drive A: is disk0   <-------------------- last message seen
> BIOS drive B: is disk1   <-------------------- or this
> ...
>
> Based on Google search results:
> - solved by disabling SATA in BIOS
> - combination of IDE (ATA) and SATA disks caused a problem, disconnecting
>   either one solved it; it could also mean a problem with hd device driver
> - old/buggy firmware; BIOS update solved the problem
> - disable ACPI, or Firewire, or USB emulation, or ... in BIOS :-)
> - "A wild guess could be that there's something on the RAID volume that's
>   keeping the boot loader from working. Maybe the partition table is wrong
>   in a subtle way? If you can get the RAID array to work *after* you boot
>   from a FreeBSD installation CD (i.e. boot the machine without the
>   drives, add drives later), try clearing the first megabyte of the array
>   (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/yourdrive bs=1m count=1)."
> - "With my rocketraid somethingsomething PCI-SATA2 card with disks
>   connected crashes the BTX loader. Connecting the disks to the internal
>   via epia motherboard solved the problem ...
>   I have a feeling that it might be some combinations of BTX, BIOS and
>   RAID firmware that causes these crashes."
> - CC'ing John Baldwin on this, as he has knowledge of BTX's internals.
>
> For those of you who are adventurous:
> http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/boot/i386/loader/
>

I'he updated BIOS and now all works as expected.
System is bootable from installation CD with HDD connected, system
bootable from HDD.

Thanks for help.


-- 
S.Listopad