From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Feb 2 2: 1: 7 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mercury.nildram.co.uk (mercury.nildram.co.uk [195.112.4.37]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B6FEC37B698 for ; Fri, 2 Feb 2001 02:00:49 -0800 (PST) Received: from nermal.unix-consult.com (tgeusch.dial.nildram.co.uk [195.149.29.39]) by mercury.nildram.co.uk (8.10.0/8.10.0.Beta10) with ESMTP id f12A0il00565 for ; Fri, 2 Feb 2001 10:00:47 GMT Received: (qmail 17509 invoked by uid 1002); 2 Feb 2001 09:35:09 -0000 Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 09:35:09 +0000 From: Timo Geusch To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Installation (Sysinstall?) problem on Compaq WS5000 Message-ID: <20010202093509.A17481@nermal.unix-consult.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG All, the company I work for has recently aquired two of these machines to replace a vastly overspecced firewall and external mailserver. However we are currently using them as doorstops as we are experiencing 'interesting' problems when trying to install our favourite stable & secure operating systems on it. Whereas OpenBSD 2.8 installs and runs, it only recognizes 16MB out of 64. This might just about be enough, but it certainly is not good. FreeBSD 4.0-RELEASE and 4.2-RELEASE do not even complete the installation. Here is a rough sequence of events when using sysinstall: - It boots up fine into sysinstall. IF you boot from CD, it will complain that it is not able to detect the CD drive (ata) without lots of retries. - Standard install, fdisk & disklabel the disk works fine. Initialize the disk; works. After a reboot, sysinstall finds the slices initialized. - Now it is trying to read the packages from CD, it times out. End of install. - Trying to install over the network produces the same problem. It gets to the point where it initialised the disks but fails immediately afterwards. So the questions are: - Was anybody able to get FreeBSD up and running on a single-processor WS5000? - Is this a known problem? I've searched the archives but so far didn't find anything. - Can anybody confirm that an older version of FreeBSD (i.e. 2.2.x, 3.x) installs on these boxes? I don't mind cvsupping through several generations of FreeBSD if necessary... As I can't produce a DMESG for these machines, here's a list of hardware AFAIR: - Dual Pentium Pro mainboard, single processor equipped. Not overclocked. - IDE and NCR SCSI on board, sound on board (not relevant). - ThunderLan network adapter on board - Matrox Millenium - SCSI Harddrive, IDE CDROM. - Latest BIOS and diagnostics installed. Any hints regarding sucessful installation on these machines would be much appreciated. Please cc me on any reply as I am not subscribed to freebsd-questions. TIA, Timo To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message