From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Jul 13 13:59:50 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.FreeBSD.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B655137B400 for ; Sat, 13 Jul 2002 13:59:45 -0700 (PDT) Received: from post.webmailer.de (natpost.webmailer.de [192.67.198.65]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8279643E75 for ; Sat, 13 Jul 2002 13:59:44 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from smazerski@yahoo.co.jp) Received: from ianb (pD9EB1A8A.dip.t-dialin.net [217.235.26.138]) by post.webmailer.de (8.9.3/8.8.7) with ESMTP id WAA15300 for ; Sat, 13 Jul 2002 22:59:43 +0200 (MET DST) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" From: Steve Mazerski To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Slow boot initialisation Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2002 23:01:11 +0200 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.4] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Message-Id: <200207132301.11336.smazerski@yahoo.co.jp> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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=20 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=20 (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, th= e=20 system seems to be doing a series of seeks to each hard disks alternative= ly,=20 but nothing else apart from keeping the "waiting" symbol turning.=20 This continues for a painful amount of time, i.e. long enough to wonder=20 whether the installation went wrong, or if the hard disks are slowly and=20 irrevocably=20 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 =20 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 proble= m; - 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 majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message