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Date:      Tue, 1 Mar 2005 00:21:52 +0100
From:      Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony@wanadoo.fr>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Installation instructions for Firefox somewhere?
Message-ID:  <559806389.20050301002152@wanadoo.fr>
In-Reply-To: <20050228223623.M43989@reiteration.net>
References:  <42224A80.9010109@wanadoo.es> <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNAEJCFAAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> <20050228140846.Y94755@makeworld.com> <42238E68.3090604@cis.strath.ac.uk> <20050228223623.M43989@reiteration.net>

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John writes:

> Have you considered the possibility that windows just didn't
> report the error?

Yes.  If that's true, and if no actual data loss is occurring, then I'm
not worried about the error ... although I'd like to know how to remove
the error messages, in that case.

FreeBSD actually stalls when the errors occur (or more precisely, the
process doing the I/O stalls--the rest of the OS keeps on running).

> Just because it is unreported under windows doesn't mean it's
> not happening...

True, but I'd need to establish that for certain; I'm not going to just
assume that it was happening and Windows ignored it.

> And just because it has been working for 8 years without a problem doesn't
> mean it will go working for a further 8, even if you change nothing..

The chance of these drives both failing _on the same day_ that I install
FreeBSD is less than one in 70 million.  So that's not it.

> Saying that, I do notice that sometimes, I do get scsi errors on boot,
> but then again I have modified the delay in probing the devices from
> 15000ms to 5000 in order to speed up boot. Probably unwise, given that
> the system has 2 scsi cards in, and as well as 5 drives, a scsi cdrom,
> it also has a scanner, which is slow to wake up.

I left the delay at 15 seconds for this reason (there's a second SCSI
controller on the system, although I haven't used that thus far), but
that doesn't seem to help.

> Saying *that*, on boot, one card always boots up fast. Sometimes the
> other card also boots up, sometimes it times out. But at the login
> prompt, everything on the system is up. This is prior to the boot
> loader loading, so it cannot possibly be FreeBSD.

Some SCSI hardware takes a long time to initialize.

> You haven't told us what you mean by scsi errors. Is it like I describe, or is
> it subsequent to bootup?

I've posted the errors in a previous message (it's a lot of text).

It occurs mostly during periods of high disk activity, especially when
I'm trying to download packages or something.  It doesn't seem to occur
at all on an idle system, which is logical, I guess.

Another problem is that the system simply refuses to boot from the SCSI
disk; I have to boot from the installation diskettes, then change the
current device in the loader program, point to the SCSI disk, and boot
again, which works perfectly (but it takes 15 minutes to go through the
whole process, and of course it cannot be automated).  Oddly enough, I
installed boot0cfg to put a boot selector out there, and the hardware
finds and runs that off the SCSI disk with no problem.  It even gives
the FreeBSD slice as a choice for boot.  But when I actually select the
FreeBSD slice, it freezes.  I'm sure this isn't hardware, either.
Something is wrong in the way the disks are set up, or there's a bug.

-- 
Anthony




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