Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 11:20:01 -0400 (EDT) From: Robert Watson <robert@cyrus.watson.org> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Hang during install (probing devices) Dell Dimension XPS P90 (pentium), Western Digital Caviar 21000 Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.990811111539.3772B-100000@fledge.watson.org>
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We were recently trying to install FreeBSD onto one of our test servers, a Dell Pentium 90 (Dimension XPS P90), and had repeated problems with sysinstall/kernel hangs when "Probing for devices". It would appear to boot the kernel fine and correctly discover hardware, but when sysinstall popped up its dialog about probing devices, most system functions would hang. The num lock key still changed the keyboard light, but no scroll back occured with scroll lock, or changing of vt's. This was with both FreeBSD 3.1 and 3.2 release versions. We recently tracked it down to being a problem with the Western Digital Caviar 21000 drive in the machine, as we moved the drive to another machine, and it also hung on that machine where it had not previously. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with this problem--we can use the Dell fine now (well, sans CDROM drive because FreeBSD seems not to like the IDE ATAPI drive) with a new hard disk, but the old hard disk hangs the install on all the machines we've tried. Any thoughts on why a particular hard disk would hang FreeBSD's probe? BSD/OS 3.x installs and boots in the machine fine. Robert N M Watson robert@fledge.watson.org http://www.watson.org/~robert/ PGP key fingerprint: AF B5 5F FF A6 4A 79 37 ED 5F 55 E9 58 04 6A B1 TIS Labs at Network Associates, Computing Laboratory at Cambridge University Safeport Network Services To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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