Watchdog Reset

[Doug White]

On Wed, 4 Feb 2004, Phillip Walters wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I've got FreeBSD 5.2 installed on a SunFire v100.  After a seemingly
> random period of time, I always get the following:
>
> Watchdog Reset
> Externally Initiated Reset

This generally means there is a hardware problem with the system.  Sun
suggests running this at the ok prompt immediately following the failure
to extract any messages (this may not work right with bsd):

f8002010 wector p

You may want to set the watchdog-reset? OBP variable to false so you can
capture these better.

Now this could be a bug in FreeBSD; the doc (InfoDoc 11371) mentions that
these types of resets can happen if the CPU gets a trap when traps have
been disabled.  But my experience with sun hardware leans toward this
being a hardware fault.

> After this, I'm dropped to the 'ok' prompt where I can boot the machine
> back up.  Anyone have any clue what's going on here?

You might try running max diagnostics, or put Solaris on the system and
bang on it.  If you can get Solaris to croak, that would tend to point
at more of a hardware issue.

> warning: no time-of-day clock registered, system time will not be set
> accurately

This is a wierd one.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite at gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org