Installing 6.2-BETA3 from floppies

[Julian H. Stacey]

Eugene Grosbein wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 03:43:41PM +0700, Eugene Grosbein wrote:
> 
> > > I've prepared 4 floppy disks and tried to boot from floppies.
> > > It successfully loads kernel and acpi.ko and shows menu
> > > formerly known as 'Beastie' (now draws 'FreeBSD' instead of Chuck).
> > > The menu shows that FreeBSD detects that this system does not
> > > have ACPI and will boot without ACPI support enabled.
> > > 
> > > However, timer does not 'tick' and there is always 10 seconds left.
> > > I choose verbose mode, it starts to show its diagnostic output
> > > but last line it shows is 'Calibrating clocks...' then it halts:
> > > keyboard leds do not switch, there is no reaction on 'Ctrl-Alt-ESC'.
> > 
> > Hmm, I was too quick... The kernel has spent lots of minutes
> > 'sitting in this pose' but suddenly said that clock calibration
> > has failed and it will use default frequency. Then it booted Ok
> > and I've installed the system to HDD using 6.1-RELEASE (I do not
> > have complete 6.2-BETA3 CD here but plan to do binary upgrade
> > over FTP).
> > 
> > When installation process was finished, it rebooted from HDD
> > but it now it sits again at the same stage trying to calibrate clock,
> > 5 minutes are gone already. So the question is what should I do
> > to skip this stage and have accurate timers still.
> 
> I've rebuild kernel without any CALIBRATE_XXX options
> but it still tries to calibrate clock and hangs for 15 minutes exactly
> then proceedes to probe devices and boots Ok.
> 
> When I first booted this old machine its BIOS said that Date/Time in CMOS
> are corrupted and asked to press F1 to enter SETUP to fix this
> or press ESC to continue booting. Enterins SETUP and correcting
> settings does not help and BIOS complains again that Date/Time are wrong
> and does not proceed without a key is pressed on keyboard.
> That's not suitable for small standalone router so I went to the store,
> bought Duracell DL2032 3V battary and replaced old
> Panasonic CD2032 3V battary. That satisfied BIOS POST and it no more
> complains about Date/Time. But FreeBSD spends 15 minutes to calibrate clock.
> 
> Now I've put back old Panasonic CD2032 3V and hey, BIOS complains again
> but FreeBSD boots normally and completes clock calibration very quickly.
> 
> I wonder, how new battery may affect clock calibration routines
> and why old bad battery does not affect it that way?
> 
> Eugene Grosbein

After changing battery I'd assume every piece of your CMOS BIOS is
potentialy wrong.  I'd do a factory reset of BIOS (not just checking
things (*)) & then set what I wanted in every position going through
BIOS before wondering what the interaction with any OS was.

(*) I've known a BIOS (Gigabyte 486-33 AMD I think, but principle applies
to others), where I reset every CMOS field exactly how it should be, yet
board didnt work right, then I did a factory reset, & set personal
prefs again & then it did work.  Lesson was that BIOS manuf. was resetting
more than it displayed (& something must have got scrambled but not
displayed)

-- 
Julian Stacey.  BSD Unix C Net Consultancy, Munich/Muenchen  http://berklix.com
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