On 9/15/25 23:49, H. Hartzer wrote:
On Tue Sep 16, 2025 at 3:01 AM UTC, Nick Holland wrote:
On 9/15/25 18:46, [email protected] wrote:
Really, give serious thought to #4. I'm all for recycling old stuff, but
this is a really old machine to do something desktop-ish with. Not enough
processor or memory to use a modern browser on. Slow disk access (pciide,
which amittedly beats wdc(4), but ... horrible compared to ahci(4)).
Oh My. Did you really put a 2TB drive on an pciide(4) controller? I don't
think I've ever tried something that wacky. Dang. I don't think that's at
all related to your problem, but I do think that combination indicates you
need to reconsider some life choices. Whatever you are planning to do with
this, 2TB on a pciide(4) controller is gonna be painful.
So...while someone more skilled than me might be able to give you some
advice to fix this machine, I really question if that's your best course of
action.
(I'm sitting here looking at my not-yet-in-production 24T drive and wondering
how many days it takes to fsck after tripping over the power cord when
attached to a pciide(4) system...wonder if I got any of those left...)
Nick.
Nick,
You bring up an interesting point here about pciide....
Is IDE emulation turned on in the BIOS? I'd switch it to AHCI and do a
reinstall.
I have never heard of an i5 with physical IDE!
Said hardware is newer than what I'm typing on right now.
-Henrich
I'm keying off your BIOS's date from the dmesg. From memory, I believe a lot
of SATA chips of that vintage were able to do AHCI, but I know at least some
(looking at you, Dell) didn't make it an option to utilize it. HOWEVER, as your
machine has an Intel firmware and Intel chipset, I'd guess if the HW can do it,
you can turn it on. Look in the firmware for something about disk mode
operation,
common options are worded something like "compatible" (that's bad), RAID (also
bad
but for other reasons), "Advanced" (that's our friend, ahci(4)).
Regarding other comments: a bad RTC battery can cause issues with installation
(HTTPS certificates not being valid), but that's not your problem. I've never
seen a bad RTC battery cause a panic on a PC system, and in fact, some OpenBSD
supported platforms don't even have a battery backed RTC. I've installed and
ran OpenBSD on a lot of machines with dead batteries.
i386 vs amd64...yeah, if amd64 works on this machine, use it, unless you have a
compelling reason not to. MIGHT solve your problem...keep in mind, i386 is now
really a legacy platform, and doesn't receive as much use (and thus, testing) as
amd64 at this time. I'm not saying an OS bug shouldn't be found and fixed, but
a
HW bug (and yes, that's a strong possibility here) won't receive the attention
on i386 that it might on amd64.
Nick.
