> I'm trying to boot the 2008.05 live CD on two of my
> notebooks. Each is failing badly and I was hoping
> someone might have advice on boot options, etc. that
> I can try.
>
> 1) Acer 3680-2862, i943GML chipset, upgraded from
> Celeron M 440 to Core Duo T2250. The CD boots, but
> shortly after displaying the copyright notice and
> before displaying the detecting devices message, it
> locks hard.
You could try to find out some more information by enabling
verbose kernel boot messages, booting with the kmdb kernel
debugger, and tracing kernel module loading.
See this blog for details:
http://blogs.sun.com/dmick/entry/diagnosing_kernel_hangs_panics_with
> 2) Sony Vaio PCG-K37, 3.2ghz P4m with an Ali chipset.
> The CD boots, but something goes wrong when detecting
> devices. After a long delay, I get two messages about
> problems detecting the UARTs for asy0 and asy1;
Is that something like:
asy1: UART @ 2f8 scratch register: expected 0x5a, got 0xff
Cannot identify UART chip at 2f8
That happens on systems without usable ACPI support.
When ACPI isn't available for device enumeration, Solaris
falls back to hardcoded values for certain ISA devices
(PS/2 keyboard & mouse, 2 serial ports, 1 parallel port).
Typically there are no more serial ports on current HW,
so the hardcoded values are wrong, and this results in the
above UART/ASY messages.
Should be harmless. It's just a warning.
> I assume that this must be a problem with the BIOS
> and/or chipset reporting serial ports that don't
> actually exist.
Most likely Solaris' fallback defaults, when ACPI isn't available.
Are there any BIOS setup options to enable ACPI?
> Eventually, I get an error that the
> console service can not be started and get dropped to
> the prompt for maintenance mode.
Not sure why is does this. Maybe because the hardcoded
values for ISA device are wrong for the PS/2 keyboard / mouse.
What kind of keyboard / mouse hardware are you using here?
USB (unlikely for a notebook)? Does the keyboard work
for a login?
Or it's unable to access the LiveCD, maybe due to missing
support of the Ali chipset? What kind of HDD & optical devices
are you using on this system? P-ATA or S-ATA?
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