Date: Wed, 02 Oct 1996 18:20:39 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: bde@freebsd.org Cc: current@freebsd.org, phk@freebsd.org Subject: Weird boot problem we've picked up post-2.1-RELEASE Message-ID: <28267.844305639@time.cdrom.com>
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The following error report:
>From: matt@bdd.net (Matthew Stein)
>Organization: ButtonDown Digital
>
>I've installed FreeBSD 2.2-960801-SNAP on a machine which previously ran
>FreeBSD without error. Now that I've reinstalled, and changed the boot
>drive, I'm at a loss.
>
>When booting off of /dev/wd1, the boot process stops right after the first
>prompt, and scrolls this error repeatedly up the screen. If I enter
>"wd(1,a)kernel" at the first prompt, the machine boots perfectly.
Has now become something of an unpleasantly recurring theme. One of
Walnut Creek CDROM's own Customers From Hell had this problem with a
Packard Bell machine, scrolling the "C:0 H:0 S:0" errors right after
the boot prompt and then quickly resetting (that's the old bit). That
customer, unfortunately, chose to burn his bridges so we won't be
talking to him anymore, but Yet Another report from the considerably
more cooperative Mischka Hughes says:
>Yup - I get the 4 or so lines of boot info then the Boot: prompt,
>then I wait 5 secs and then I get the scrolling errors.
>If this is consistent with the previous boot.flp then pressing a key
>or typing -c <CR> will produce the same scroling errors instantly.
About his Gateway system. Aleksander Wittlin says much the same thing
about his Gateway, though with an interesting "solution" at the end:
>Well, I had the same problem with Gateway 2000 P5-100. The floppy
>was OK, I tried several ones. And they worked on another PCs. Also
>2.1.0 boot floppy worked without problems.
> Then I updated the BIOS ROM of my motherboard (Triton rev. 1)
>from rev. BR0T 1.005 to BR01.010 (with update files from Gateway 2000
>web site) and bingo. Now the same floppy boots and I can finally install
>2.1.5. I still do not understand what was the reason for that error,
>but obviously it was not a floppy.
In all cases, the 2.1.5 boot floppy was verified to be perfectly
correct, it worked in other PCs and, furthermore, the 2.1 boot floppy
worked fine where the 2.1.5 version exhibited these symptoms. I've
also verified with Mischka that the problem occurs with the latest 2.2
SNAP, so it's still very much there.
I know that Aleksander's solution tends to suggest that there are just
these Packard Bells and Gateways out there with non-conformant BIOSes,
but asking everyone to upgrade their BIOS is not much of a solution,
especially when we somehow managed to avoid the problem entirely in
2.1-RELEASE.
Any ideas?
Jordan
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