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Date:      Sat, 13 Jul 2002 23:01:11 +0200
From:      Steve Mazerski <smazerski@yahoo.co.jp>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Slow boot initialisation
Message-ID:  <200207132301.11336.smazerski@yahoo.co.jp>

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I'm considering replacing Linux with FreeBSD and have just
made a test installation on my "desktop" machine. This is
an unspectacular KMD K6 with two IDE drives and no
exotic hardware.

The installation seems to have been successful. I=20
installed 4.6-RELEASE on a free primary partition (ca. 1 GB)
on the first (master) IDE drive. The partition is marked as bootable;
the boot manager is LILO.

FreeBSD boots, but with a significant delay between the
initial "BTX Loader" messages and the actual boot process, during
which there is some unusual-sounding hard disk activity.

It goes something like this:

 BTX-Loader=20
 (some messages about drive numbering...)
 FreeBSD  bootstrap loader, Revision 0.8
 |/-\ ...
 Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf
 |/-\ ...
 /kernel (...)
 |/-\ ...
 (FreeBSD boots with usual kernel messages at usual speeds)

Every time the "waiting" symbols (i.e. the ASCII chars |/-\ ) appears, th=
e=20
system seems to be doing a series of seeks to each hard disks alternative=
ly,=20
but nothing else apart from keeping the "waiting" symbol turning.=20

This continues for a painful amount of time, i.e. long enough to wonder=20
whether the installation went wrong, or if the hard disks are slowly and=20
irrevocably=20
being munged (they are in fact OK), probably 20-30 seconds each time.

I am not at all happy with this, and don't want to go any further until
this behavior can be corrected. Anyone know what's causing it
and / or what can be done?

For the record:
 - the FreeBSD installation itself is OK, all hardware seems to
   be recognized
 - the IDE disks are attached to the motherboard's first onboard IDE  =20
   controller (motherboard is an ASUS P5A-B);
 - a CD-ROM is connected as master to the second IDE controller;
 - under Linux there are no problems with this setup;
 - I installed 4.5-RELEASE on the same partition, exactly the same proble=
m;
 - I have installed 4.5-RELEASE on two other systems (one with SCSI, one =
with
   SCSI and IDE harddisks, FreeBSD went on the SCSI disks) and have
   not had this problem).


Any ideas?

Yours

S.Mazerski



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