FreeBSD 7 installs where FreeBSD 8 wont due to CD

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Mon, Dec 06, 2010 at 11:52:25PM +0000, Pete French wrote:
> > This problem has been reported many times in the past and almost
> > certainly has nothing to do with 8.x.  Here's a thread about the matter
> > where a user states the same as you but about 7.1:
> >
> > http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/questions/2008-10/msg00307.html
> 
> I found that - it appears to be a different problem because....
> 
> > I would question 1) the burning software you used, and 2) the physical
> > media you used.  Also try burning the ISO to another disc (even if of
> 
> ....I am not burning a CD or using any physical media. I am booting
> directly off the image file using iLO. Hence the stuff in that thread
> doesnt apply. It's defintely 8 specific - I can boot an mage
> from 7 it works fine, but 8 doesn't.
> 
> I think this is to do with USB now - the machine has a physical
> drive as well (acd0) - is it possible that the installer sees
> that, but not the USB connected drive ? So it tries that drive
> instead, which would produce the error message in question, just
> as if there was corrupt physical media [Indeed, the physical drive
> may well contain an Audio CD - I have no idea what the guys in the
> data centre might have put in it]
> 
> I can't really do this physically - I'm in London and the server is
> somewhere in Louisiana, USA. Makes it hard to diagnose things.

Oh, I see.  Yes, there have been discussions about problems with the iLO
stuff and the USB "stuff" on FreeBSD.

acd0 = ATA-based ATAPI, e.g. a CD drive connected to an ATA port
cd0  = SCSI-based CD via CAM, e.g. a CD drive connected to a SCSI port

USB on FreeBSD makes use of CAM, not ATA, which means a USB-based CD
should be showing up as cd0 not acd0.

If there is a physical CD-ROM drive which is upsetting sysinstall, I
wouldn't be surprised (sysinstall is depressing, please don't get me
started on it.  :-) ).  I'm willing to bet it makes the assumption
there's only one CD device in the system.

My recommendation?  At the loader prompt, try disabling the ATA port
that acd0 is associated with.  E.g. if acd0 is tied to ata1-slave,
then at loader do:

set hint.ata.1.disabled="1"
boot

If the system in question has an IDE/ATA disk as ataX-master and the
CD-ROM drive as ataX-slave, then your best choice would be to disable
the Slave portion in your system BIOS and see if that improves things.
(I do not know if you can do something like hint.acd.0.disabled="1";
so I'm assuming you can't).  I know you can change the BIOS settings
remotely via iLO.

Hope this gives you some ideas or things to try.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |