Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 14 Mar 2003 20:15:43 -0800
From:      "Adam Lofstedt" <adaml@visimation.com>
To:        <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   BTX Halted and Fatal Trap 12 errors on older machine
Message-ID:  <018001c2eaa9$8d19b500$6501a8c0@5adam5>

next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
I've got this spare machine, and I thought it would be perfect as a
FreeBSD box to play with.  It's a P-100mHz, with 32MB RAM, floppy, video
card, two PCI NICs, 50X CDROM, 40GB Western Digital hard drive, and one
IDE controller.  

However, I can't boot at all from any bootable FreeBSD ISO (tried
4.5,4.6,4.7, and 5.0).  I can boot RedHat, Windows, and NetBSD cds
though.  When I try to boot from CD, I get a BTX Halted error message
right away, before the hardware even gets probed.  I tried changing
every BIOS setting possible, but the FreeBSD ISO's just don't work on
this system.  Anyone have any ideas why I would get this error?

So, I then used the bootable floppies and successfully started
sysinstall.  Each of about 25 installation attempts failed at different
points with "Fatal Trap 12" errors.  Installations failed during
sysinstall extracting files, and during Gnome or KDE installation,
either installing from CD or FTP.  Sometimes installation would
successfully complete, I would reboot, login, do some stuff, and then
another Fatal Trap 12 error would appear.  This occurred while
installing various packages, while upgrading ports tree with cvsup, and
during compiling/installation of various ports.

The only thing that seems to be a common thread is that the Fatal Trap
12 errors occur during heavy disk read/write periods.  Memtest-86 showed
no memory errors at all, and I ran a disk utility to check for badblocks
on hd, and the drive is healthy.

I'm pretty sure that the BTX errors and the Fatal Trap 12 errors are
probably not related...

Before I spend more time on this dang machine, does it sound like there
is something that I can work around these problems with?  Or should I
just forget about this miserable thing?

Thanks,

Trying hard to use freebsd... 
Adam


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?018001c2eaa9$8d19b500$6501a8c0>