Re: Suggestions for PII 400 boot failure
Chris Pratt wrote: On Nov 20, 2008, at 4:31 PM, Vinny wrote: Hi, A friend of mine is trying out FreeBSD and ran into a booting problem. Here is his message: Well, that's discouraging. I have put together an old PII 400 with three 20GB drives and a CDROM that I'd like to run BSD on. Half a GB of RAM I figured would be respectable. Downloaded the ISO files, burned CDs of them and when I try to run them it starts to boot and then freezes tighter than a muskrat's arse. Three lines coming on the screen and it ends with Starting the_ and just hangs. He might want to try downloading the floppy set and booting from there. I think that is what I did on an old Dell 200 I'm using as a bridging firewall at home. This is a pathetically old machine and won't boot the ISO (I found it when cleaning out my rental, left to throw away by the renter), but it works great once you finally get the system on it. It's on 6.2 but I imagine 7.0 will be fine. Thanks everyone for your help, Here is a message from my friend: Well, it's been a long day but I've had some success on the BSD front. I went to a couple of used/recycling/salvage places today looking for a PIII or low-end P4 motherboard and processor. I didn't see anything that was very interesting so toodled on home and had a cup of tea. I decided since the system was essentially running fine (without an OS) that I'd give the floppy disk install a bit of a run. So I downloaded all the floppy disk image files and fdimage.exe (the utility to convert them) and created all the necessary floppy disks. I did a simple install, paritioned the drives and created a user and administrator account along with some basic network settings. It seemed to connect to the internet just fine during boot up and when I ran ping against google.ca I was receiving back valid addressing information so it appears that that is all working fine. So I ran /usr/sbin/sysinstall from the root directory to try to customize the installation a bit better. I adjusted the media type to an ftp server as opposed to CDROM and POOF... Bob Shurunkel... BSD is now downloading an X-Windows interface from the internet as we (or I in this case) speak. I suspect there's going to be a bit of a learning curve here but I'm looking forward to it. It could have been much simpler if I would have been able to install from CD to being with but there definitely is a workaround which, in itself, pleases me. Will keep you posted. Vinny ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Suggestions for PII 400 boot failure
Hi, A friend of mine is trying out FreeBSD and ran into a booting problem. Here is his message: Well, that's discouraging. I have put together an old PII 400 with three 20GB drives and a CDROM that I'd like to run BSD on. Half a GB of RAM I figured would be respectable. Downloaded the ISO files, burned CDs of them and when I try to run them it starts to boot and then freezes tighter than a muskrat's arse. Three lines coming on the screen and it ends with Starting the_ and just hangs. I've got a PIII 1000 here that I use as a file server and the boot disks run fine on that. Just won't boot off the PII 400. Weird. Really, really weird. I tried five different CDROMs in case it was the actual drive but same thing. I tried using version 6.3 instead of release 7.0 and same thing. That system doesn't like BSD/Linux whatever. I use GParted as a partition manager all the time which is bootable and same thing on that machine. It just don't like booting to that OS. Any suggestions? Thanks Vinny ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Suggestions for PII 400 boot failure
On Nov 20, 2008, at 4:31 PM, Vinny wrote: Hi, A friend of mine is trying out FreeBSD and ran into a booting problem. Here is his message: Well, that's discouraging. I have put together an old PII 400 with three 20GB drives and a CDROM that I'd like to run BSD on. Half a GB of RAM I figured would be respectable. Downloaded the ISO files, burned CDs of them and when I try to run them it starts to boot and then freezes tighter than a muskrat's arse. Three lines coming on the screen and it ends with Starting the_ and just hangs. He might want to try downloading the floppy set and booting from there. I think that is what I did on an old Dell 200 I'm using as a bridging firewall at home. This is a pathetically old machine and won't boot the ISO (I found it when cleaning out my rental, left to throw away by the renter), but it works great once you finally get the system on it. It's on 6.2 but I imagine 7.0 will be fine. FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p3 #3: Mon Apr 9 09:11:48 UTC 2007 snip Timecounter i8254 frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0 CPU: Pentium/P55C (199.43-MHz 586-class CPU) Origin = GenuineIntel Id = 0x544 Stepping = 4 Features=0x8001bfFPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,MCE,CX8,MMX real memory = 100663296 (96 MB) avail memory = 93102080 (88 MB) Intel Pentium detected, installing workaround for F00F bug I've got a PIII 1000 here that I use as a file server and the boot disks run fine on that. Just won't boot off the PII 400. Weird. Really, really weird. I tried five different CDROMs in case it was the actual drive but same thing. I tried using version 6.3 instead of release 7.0 and same thing. That system doesn't like BSD/Linux whatever. I use GParted as a partition manager all the time which is bootable and same thing on that machine. It just don't like booting to that OS. Any suggestions? Thanks Vinny ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Suggestions for PII 400 boot failure
Vinny wrote: Hi, A friend of mine is trying out FreeBSD and ran into a booting problem. Here is his message: Well, that's discouraging. I have put together an old PII 400 with three 20GB drives and a CDROM that I'd like to run BSD on. Half a GB of RAM I figured would be respectable. Downloaded the ISO files, burned CDs of them and when I try to run them it starts to boot and then freezes tighter than a muskrat's arse. Three lines coming on the screen and it ends with Starting the_ and just hangs. I've got a PIII 1000 here that I use as a file server and the boot disks run fine on that. Just won't boot off the PII 400. Weird. Really, really weird. I tried five different CDROMs in case it was the actual drive but same thing. I tried using version 6.3 instead of release 7.0 and same thing. That system doesn't like BSD/Linux whatever. I use GParted as a partition manager all the time which is bootable and same thing on that machine. It just don't like booting to that OS. Any suggestions? Thanks Vinny Excerpt from Installers guide www.a1poweruser.com PC BIOS The first thing your PC does after being powered on or when rebooting is the motherboard BIOS ROM chip gets control and it interrogates all the hardware ports on the motherboard to determine what I/O devices are attached. This is called the POST process. As part of this POST process the user changeable BIOS values stored in a CMOS chip on the motherboard are read and used to configure the PC’s hardware. These BIOS values are changed using the BIOS setup utility. The most common BOIS chip in use today is manufactured by Award. If your PC does not use an Award BIOS chip then you have to read the manual that came with your PC for details. This summary screen information is very helpful in debugging FBSD hardware problems, because it tells you what your PC hardware is and how the IRQ numbers are assigned. IRQ stands for interrupt request. An interrupt is the doorway the I/O device uses to tell the CPU that it wants its turn at getting some processing cycles. This is how the CPU shares service time among all the devices attached to the motherboard. Starting Award BIOS setup utility During the power up/reboot POST process you will see in the lower left corner of the monitor screen the message ‘Press DEL to enter setup’. While this message is showing press the keyboard delete key and the Award BIOSs setup utility main menu displays on the screen. First time changes to PC BIOS Navigate around the menus using the keyboard arrow keys looking for the following options. Your PC BIOS may not have all of these. Virus Warning=, set this option to disable. It’s a firmware check of the hard drive boot sector looking for MS/Windows boot virus. This will stop FBSD booting from the install CDROM. plug-n-play=, set this option to disable. FBSD is not sensitive to Microsoft plug-n-play standard and may refuse to install, or cause PCI cards not to be found. Disable or set to auto any BIOS option to assign IRQ numbers to PCI expansion slots. Disable any ISA expansion slots. Operating system type=, set to ‘other’ or any Unix type of operating system, don’t set to MS/Windows. Disable all power management options. boot sequence=, set this option to (CDROM,C) Since you are installing FBSD from CDROM you must tell the PC what I/O device to boot from. Follow the BIOS menu instructions to save your changes and exit. The PC will reboot it self. Keep in mind that some older CDROM drives and older legacy PC BIOS do not support booting off CDROM. Generally with PCs manufactured after 1999 this is not a problem. If you do run into this, you have a really old PC and you will need to create boot floppies to boot from. This is outside the scope of this document. Please read the FBSD Handbook at http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-pre.html#INSTALL-FLOPPIES Legacy BIOS also are incompatible with the larger hard disk sizes and the faster 66 and 100 UDMA drives. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
