From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Feb 12 13:14:49 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from relay4.inwind.it (relay4.inwind.it [212.141.53.75]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EA2E437B4EC for ; Mon, 12 Feb 2001 13:14:36 -0800 (PST) Received: from [62.98.58.174] (62.98.58.174) by relay4.inwind.it (5.1.056) id 3A88018C00014FE2 for hackers@FreeBSD.org; Mon, 12 Feb 2001 22:14:36 +0100 Received: (qmail 505 invoked by uid 1001); 12 Feb 2001 21:11:40 -0000 Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 22:11:40 +0100 From: Francesco Casadei To: Danny Braniss Cc: Paul Saab , John Baldwin , Terry Lambert , freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.org, hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Really odd "BTX halted" problem booting - PXE/diskless Message-ID: <20010212221140.B413@junior.kasby> Mail-Followup-To: Danny Braniss , Paul Saab , John Baldwin , Terry Lambert , freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.org, hackers@FreeBSD.org References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: ; from danny@cs.huji.ac.il on Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 12:13:40PM +0200 X-Operating-System: FreeBSD 3.5-STABLE i386 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 12:13:40PM +0200, Danny Braniss wrote: > In message <20010207031637.A32676@elvis.mu.org>you write: > }It its the bios disk probe that is causing the machine to fault. > > I can now confirm that it's a divide by zero in the Adaptec BIOS GRRRRRR. > (in biosdisk, when 'probing' the adaptec) and it happens on a AIC 7899, but > works ok on some other ADAPTECs. > > the problem is nasty because it's not easy to zero out the first block of the > disk if you can't get the os working :-) > > }I suppose you really dont need to probe the disks when you are netbooting. > > i got the pxeboot not to check the disks but then the kernel stepped on it :-( > > is there a way to prevent BTX to halt if the 'caller' expects a div/zero? > > (in the days of the PDP/11 i could trap such things, print a message, and > continue). > > danny > > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message > > end of the original message I had this problem a couple of days ago with an Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI controller and an IBM DDRS-34560W SCSI disk. I created one large slice in dangerously dedicated mode and I wasn't able to boot anymore: I got "BTX halted" and the registers dump. I low-level formatted the disk using the controller BIOS, recreated the slice (this time in coperative mode!) and everything worked! Francesco Casadei P.S. The DDRS-34560W uses part of the buffer for the firmware so I could safely low-level format the disk. Check if you can low-level format your disk without destroying it! To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message