I'm considering replacing Linux with FreeBSD and have just made a test installation on my "desktop" machine. This is an unspectacular KMD K6 with two IDE drives and no exotic hardware.
The installation seems to have been successful. I installed 4.6-RELEASE on a free primary partition (ca. 1 GB) on the first (master) IDE drive. The partition is marked as bootable; the boot manager is LILO. FreeBSD boots, but with a significant delay between the initial "BTX Loader" messages and the actual boot process, during which there is some unusual-sounding hard disk activity. It goes something like this: BTX-Loader (some messages about drive numbering...) FreeBSD bootstrap loader, Revision 0.8 |/-\ ... Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf |/-\ ... /kernel (...) |/-\ ... (FreeBSD boots with usual kernel messages at usual speeds) Every time the "waiting" symbols (i.e. the ASCII chars |/-\ ) appears, the system seems to be doing a series of seeks to each hard disks alternatively, but nothing else apart from keeping the "waiting" symbol turning. This continues for a painful amount of time, i.e. long enough to wonder whether the installation went wrong, or if the hard disks are slowly and irrevocably being munged (they are in fact OK), probably 20-30 seconds each time. I am not at all happy with this, and don't want to go any further until this behavior can be corrected. Anyone know what's causing it and / or what can be done? For the record: - the FreeBSD installation itself is OK, all hardware seems to be recognized - the IDE disks are attached to the motherboard's first onboard IDE controller (motherboard is an ASUS P5A-B); - a CD-ROM is connected as master to the second IDE controller; - under Linux there are no problems with this setup; - I installed 4.5-RELEASE on the same partition, exactly the same problem; - I have installed 4.5-RELEASE on two other systems (one with SCSI, one with SCSI and IDE harddisks, FreeBSD went on the SCSI disks) and have not had this problem). Any ideas? Yours S.Mazerski To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
