From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Dec 20 11:34:38 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from xfw.transarc.ibm.com (xfw.transarc.ibm.com [192.54.226.51]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D094137B41A for ; Thu, 20 Dec 2001 11:34:35 -0800 (PST) Received: from mailhost2.transarc.ibm.com (mailhost2.transarc.ibm.com [9.38.192.125]) by xfw.transarc.ibm.com (AIX4.3/UCB 8.7/8.7) with ESMTP id OAA29716 for ; Thu, 20 Dec 2001 14:25:11 -0500 (EST) Received: from smithfield.transarc.ibm.com (smithfield.transarc.ibm.com [9.38.192.92]) by mailhost2.transarc.ibm.com (8.8.0/8.8.0) with SMTP id OAA06211 for ; Thu, 20 Dec 2001 14:34:32 -0500 (EST) Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 14:34:32 -0500 (EST) From: Pat Barron To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: 4.4-R Install hangs on IBM PC 300GL Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII 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 trying to install 4.4-RELEASE on an IBM PC 300GL, and the install keeps hanging at various points in the installation (different every time). Symptoms are as follows: 1) Boot machine from CD, go thru menus to select distributions, media, etc.; all appears normal at this point. 2) Commit installation; sysinstall labels and newfs's filesystems. In case it makes any difference, this machine has a bunch of SCSI disks on it (no IDE at all). I have specified /, swap, /var, and /usr on one 4 GB SCSI drive, /usr/src using all of a separate 4 GB drive, and /usr/local using another separate 4 GB drive. As I said, newfs of the filesystems for these partitions goes fine. 3) sysinstall begins to read chunks from the distributions, and load them into the filesystems. For each distribution, however, the transfer rate reported starts out quite high, stays there for a bit, and then drops precipitously - apparently because, at various points, the installation is hanging. If I switch to the emergency holographic shell and run "ps" during one of these apparent hangs, the "ps" command itself hangs for quite a while - usually at least 30 seconds, sometimes signifigantly more - before showing the process list. At this point, the "cpio" process that sysinstall uses is usually listed in 'D' state (waiting for some I/O to complete?) 4) This goes on for a while - the extraction of the distributions will freeze - recover - freeze - recover - etc.... for quite some time. But eventually, it just hangs forever; it gets into the "freeze" state, and simply never comes out of it again. If I then go to the emergency holographic shell and run "ps", it too hangs forever. Any guesses/hints/etc. on what the problem might be? I've installed FreeBSD dozens of times, in various versions (all the way back to 1.1), and on lots of different kinds of machines, and have never seen an installation fail in quite this way. Then again, I have never tried to install on a 300GL before, never tried to install on an all-SCSI system before, and this is the first time I've ever tried to install 4.4 ...... We have tried a Linux distribution too, and an old version of Mandrake Linux was found to install just fine. Thanks for any help .... --Pat. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message