Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 17:21:58 -0400 From: "Brian P. Trotter" <btrotter@pobox.com> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Installation oddities for i386 install Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20011015170218.00adccf0@127.0.0.1>
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I have a Pentium-200 w//64mb RAM and a 3com 3c905c NIC that I am installing FreeBSD 4.4 on. It is giving me a couple weird problems that I am hoping someone can help me with. I have attempted an install about 5 different times, each time using a different NIC, removing memory, reseating cards, and trying different install options, and they all pretty much do the same thing. First of all, I put in a 4gb IDE drive, set it to boot from CD-rom, inserted the install CD, and fired it up. The install screen came up fine, and I proceed to do a kernel config and install. The first thing that I notice is a bad case of intermittent "pauses". I will have a screen where I have to choose between which options to select. I will be pressing my down arrow and all of a sudden everything will just freeze for about 30-45 seconds, and then start up again. During this time, I can press the arrows, space, enter, etc, and it acts as though it is locked up. However, once it "unpauses" whatever buttons I pressed were obviously remembered, because it does them all at once. This pausing problem continues throughout the rest of the install. Even going as far as pausing the package installation steps where it shows each package being decompressed, and they will pause, and then resume again. There have even been a couple times where the installation would in fact lock up in the middle of a package installation, and I would have to reset it and start over. Second... once, after I trudged through a 1-hour install... taking into account all the 45 second pauses, I finally got FreeBSD installed, and rebooted. However, this time an error started flooding across the screen. The error was: lnc%d: Transmit late collision -- Net error? lnc%d: Loss of carrier during transmit -- Net error? lnc%d: Transmit of packet failed after 16 attempts -- TDR = %d lnc%d: Heartbeat error -- SQE test failed lnc%d: Babble error - more than 1519 bytes transmitted lnc%d: Transmit interrupt but not start of packet -- Resetting lnc%d: Start of packet found before end of previous in transmit ring -- Resetting lnc%d: End of transmitted packet not found -- Resetting lnc%d: Transmit buffer error -- Resetting lnc%d: Transmit underflow error -- Resetting I did a Google.com search on this error and saw it was referring to a problem with a NIC driver that used an AMD chipset. I was using a 3com 3c905c at the time, and it wasnt listed as one of the affected cards, but I switched it anyway. I put in a Compaq Intel 10/100 NIC, and re-installed everything. This got rid of the problem with the errors flooding the screens; however, there was still a very noticable intermittent pause every 15-20 seconds. You could be typing, and then everything would pause, and a couple seconds later, everything would resume. I did an xf86config, to get X configured, then did a startx. This was horrible. It seemed as though I was trying to run X on a 386 with 4mb of RAM. Everything was just slugging its way through all the menus and screens. I then did another reinstall and tried to select less packages to install, and the same thing kept happening. I tried reseating all my cards, and I changed out the SDRAM memory with new modules, and even put in another CPU, and tried a different NIC, and they are all doing the same thing. I wanted to rule out a hardware problem, so I installed OpenBSD on it, and the install went flawless and operated flawlessly. It is just FreeBSD that is giving me the problems. I know this is a lot to throw out, and it is a broad problem, but does anyone have any ideas? Thanks, Brian T. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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