Date: Fri, 2 Aug 1996 02:25:52 -0700 (PDT) From: "Keith Beattie[SFSU Student]" <beattie@george.lbl.gov> To: fqueries@jraynard.demon.co.uk (James Raynard) Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Reinstall from scratch (was vnode_pager_input: I/O read error) Message-ID: <199608020925.CAA18883@george.lbl.gov> In-Reply-To: <199607282009.UAA02702@jraynard.demon.co.uk> from "James Raynard" at Jul 28, 96 08:09:59 pm
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James Raynard wrote: > > I would certainly try installing from scratch again. > This is kinda long, but my 2.1.0-RELEASE just crashed hard and I had to reinstall it. I'd like to get some input on what might have gone wrong. TIA <Flashback> To refresh your memories, I had recently installed 2.1.0-RELEASE, built a new kernel which didn't finish booting because it spun trying to spawn getty's that kept dieing. I had to hit reset to reboot with the GENERIC kernel, fsck failed resulting in the loss of a few files under /usr (which is on a 1G disk of it's own, / /var and swap are on the 1st ide drive). After rebooting with the GENERIC kernel I started getting: vnode_pager_input: I/O read error vm_fault: pager input (probably hardware) error, PID 243 failure pid 243: cc1: uid 0: exited on signal 11 sprinkeled in with some: sd0(aha0:0:0): ILLEGAL REQUEST asc:24,0 Invalid field in CDB errors. I was going to start exploring if the sig 11's were from bad SIMMs but then when booting, fsck never finished due to *** /dev/rsd0s1e BAD SUPERBLOCK: VALUES IN SUPERBLOCK DISAGREE WITH THOSE IN FIRST ALTERNATE pid 13: fsck: uid 0: exited on signal 8 floating exception It was then suggested that I tweak my cache BIOS settings and look for an overheating CPU. </flashback> Well, I started by trying to see if DOS's himem /testmem:on would find any problem with my RAM, but it didn't. So, I took off the cover, pulled out SIMM's, disabled the CPU's internal and external cache (in the BIOS), rebooting with each change, with no luck, fsck still died from a sig 8. My cpu is a 486DX33 which I don't believe have a history of overheating so the only thing left to do was reformat & reinstall. <sigh> I used the windoze SCSI utilities that came with the SCSI card and disk to reformat the drive and used M$'s scandisk to check it for any errors: none found. Btw, DOS and Windoze (on my 2nd ide disk) never blinked while all these problems were happening. Granted they don't use the SCSI disk and they don't generally push hardware the same way a unix system will, but it seems worth noting. So I re-installed and compiled a new kernel. Now things seem to be working fine. I'd be exagerating though, if I said I felt confident with the system. I'm genuinely stumped as to what happened. I'm open to suggestions/opinions/whatever. Here's what's different about my system now than before: 1) I changed a few settings in my BIOS. (I found the documentation!) the changed setting are: "AT BUS Clock Selection" from CLKIN/6 to CLKIN/4 and the "Memory Read Wait State from 1 to 0". These are the suggested states for the 33MHz CPU. The rest were left at the default settings. 2) I left out a few config setting that I included on the kernel that seemed to bring my machine down. They are the "AUTO_EOI_2", "DUMMY_NOPS" and "TUNE_1542" options. LINT suggests that they might not work for all hardware. So, would one of, or a combination of these things bring a machine to it's knees? Or should I just write this off as "cosmic rays"? Oh yea, a few short questions: Are there any FreeBSD utilities to check for bad RAM? The documentation for DOS's himem.exe claims to be better than the checking that most motherboards do on startup. Anything like that for FreeBSD? Is there any documentation about BIOS settings specifically for FreeBSD? There are several other BIOS settings that might be tweaked for FreeBSD, any authoritive words on this? Tons o'thanks, Keith -- // Keith Beattie Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) \\ // SFSU Grad Student Imaging and Distributed Computing Group (ITG) \\ // KSBeattie@lbl.gov http://www-itg.lbl.gov/~beattie \\ // 1 Cyclotron Rd. MS: 50B-2239 Berkeley, CA 94720 (510) 486-6692 \\
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