5.4 fails to find boot drive, then panics.

[Mike Meyer]

In <20050628232828.G3088 at carver.gumbysoft.com>, Doug White <dwhite at gumbysoft.com> typed:
> On Fri, 24 Jun 2005, Mike Meyer wrote:
> 
> > I'm trying to install 5.4-RELEASE off of CDROM on an ASUS P5S800 motherboard
> > with a SATA drive in it. The SATA drive shows up as ad4 during the install
> > process, and the install goes just fine.
> >
> > But the resulting system fails to boot. It goes through the boot sequence,
> > draws the cute 5.x booto menu, then issues the messages:
> >
> > Can't work out which disk we are booting from.
> > Guessed BIOS device 0xffffffff not found by probes, defaulting to disk0:
> >
> > panic: free: guard1 fail @0x5195c from /usr/src/sys/boot/i386/loader/../../common/module.c:957
> > --> Press a key on the console to reboot <--
> >
> > Booting with debug messages doesn't change this at all.
> 
> This is in the loader. Your machine is seriously messed up. I'd suggest
> checking for a BIOS update. Also try rearranging your ATA channels and
> disabling DMA mode for the ATA controllers in the BIOS setup.

I figured that out. Since writing the original message, I managed to
get the thing (mostly) working by hacking the loader to wire down the
values for the boot drive rather than having it probe for them.

> Unfortunately ASUS boards of this type are known to have braindamaged
> ACPI, so this is only the beginning of a long, painful journey. :(

How far does turning off ACPI in the BIOS go towards solving these
problems? I'd be surprised if it does much, if anything.

At this point, I'm chasing a problem with network
connections. Connecting to the POP server on this machine seems to
take forever.

	Thanks,
	<mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.