BSD 6 or 7 + Intel 3200 MCH chipset

[John Nielsen]

On Tuesday 25 March 2008 09:19:00 pm Dave Overton wrote:
> Just put together a nice 1U box, Tyan Tank GT20, plugged in its 8gb ECC
> RAM, its 4 shiney new HDs and fired it up.  Bios looks normal, reset
> the clock to something resembling today, and throw in the Fbsd7 disk!
>
> No joy.
>
> I get just a hint of a "booting" line, then an instant reboot, or with
> a 6 disk, I get a scrolling mess that I have no idea what it says.

Partly guessing, but this sounds like the real-mode BTX bootloader issue. 
It's become increasingly common on newer hardware, and it's not limited 
to USB devices like it used to be. Fortunately, there is a good chance 
that jhb's recent BTX overhaul will fix it. Unfortunately, it was only 
committed to -CURRENT two weeks ago and MFC'ed to RELENG_6 and RELENG_7 
one week ago so I doubt there's a ready-to-use snapshot CD you can 
download that includes it.

If it were me I'd create a bootable USB stick (on another machine) to 
verify that you can boot the server with the latest boot blocks, then use 
it to do a manual install (or at least bootstrap the process). But that's 
just me--I like that sort of thing. It's also possible to roll your own 
installation CD but I've never done.it. I do recall someone posting an 
link to an image to one of the mailing lists, but IIRC that was with a 
BTX patch older than the one that actually got committed. Probably 
someone else on this list has a better suggestion.

JN

> My question, has anyone got fbsd running on one of these chipsets?  If
> so, how did you do it?  Tried 7 release in i386 and amd64 version, and
> v6 i386. They all do the same thing.
>
> (it will run the misc test CDs I have here just fine, even let it do
> most of a WinXP install with no issues, so I don't really believe it to
> be a hardware issue)
>
> Tyan Tank GT20 model B5211
> Tyan Toledo i3200R m/b
> Intel 3200 MCH chipset.