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Date:      Fri, 20 Oct 2000 17:05:26 -0500
From:      "Charlie Schloemer" <charlie@infoworks.net>
To:        <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, "Jason Halbert" <res02jw5@gte.net>
Subject:   Re: Installation Problem
Message-ID:  <200010202159.QAA11072@smtp.intop.net>
In-Reply-To: <000c01c03a43$9c34cde0$39e61ed1@xps>

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On 19 Oct 00, at 20:12, Jason Halbert wrote:

> FreeBSD:

> I'm having a slight problem with the installation.

> I have a PIII 733 with 128m of PC133 ram, 10g Western Digital
> Ultra ATA DMA 66 and 4g Seagate Ultra ATA DMA 33 hard drives,
> Voodoo3 3000 AGP graphics card and I've been switching back and
> forth between a Netgear 310 and 3Com PCI NICs. 

> The problem... No matter what release (4.0-Release, 4.1-Release,
> 4.1.1-Release, 5.0-Current) or what media (CD-ROM or FTP) I use,
> the install just dies.  When the files are being copied...it just
> dies.  There's really no other way to describe it.  I watch the
> debug screen and the system just decides to stop copying.  There
> is no error given.  It just stops.  The place it was stopping was
> copying the scontrib dist files.  I tried not installing those and
> it just stops somewhere else. 

> I was running it just fine on a K6-2 500 with a Maxtor 30g drive.
> I'm really confused.  If you can help I would really appreciate
> it. 

> Thanks
> Jason Halbert

Eek... generally, when the computer stops cold like that, it's due to 
flakey RAM memory; most anything else should at least give you 
an error message or panic or something.  Is it possible for you to 
attempt the install with a different stick of RAM?  Does it lock up in 
the EXACT same place every time?  Can you even switch between 
virtual consoles using Alt-F2 and Alt-F4?  

OTOH, I had fits trying to install on a new system of mine, and it 
turned out I had the RAM clocked wrong, although it was otherwise 
fine.  I had to adjust the 'CAS Latency' setting in my BIOS because 
the motherboard was autodetecting it incorrectly.  Since making 
the adjustment, there have been no problems.

Things that make flakey RAM frustrating are that (a) it always 
seems to work okay in Windows, as Windows has more of a 
tolerance for crappy hardware, and (b) it's intermittent, so it's really 
hard to nail down.  Your hardware seems pretty standard otherwise.

Good luck,
-Charlie

PS:  Also, please configure your mailer to wrap at 70 lines; a lot of 
folks on the list don't see those messages properly.




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