I have some blades (from Advent, who by the way, could have been more helpful.) When I got them second-hand, they ran Linux. Which I gladly wiped out. I can only run FreeBSD. Nothing else will work for me.
But in order to boot these boxes up I have to do an option #6 at the boot-loader prompt, and use 'set'; You probably know the drill. The thing is, my application is not feasible this way. I need another solution. I tried getting SCSI controllers and disks (and was willing to just use SCSI in place of DMA) but I discovered that I can't boot these blades with a SCSI controller in place. Don't know why, but the machines hang. I really need help from someone who has dealt with these problems and solved them. Now, with an IDE drive, I say: "set hw.hasbrokenint12=1 AND set hw.ata.ata_dma=0" (Of course, once I am up, I put these commands in /boot/loader.conf) and at least, this will make the systems work; But so slowly as to be effectively unusable. For example, FTP transfers operate at about 1MB per second and a same-disk disk copy of a 20GB file took seven hours. And while the copy was happening, the keyboard was hung. Completely. If someone knows how to solve these problems, I await your wisdom! _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"