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Date:      Tue, 02 May 2000 17:55:13 -0700
From:      Doug Wellington <ddw@NSMA.Arizona.EDU>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Startup problems...
Message-ID:  <200005030055.RAA28540@cortex.NSMA.Arizona.EDU>

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Recap so far: my department wanted to set up a RAID array to store lots and
lots of data.  They wrote a request into a grant, which was funded.  Then
the fun part began...

I didn't get enough money for a "real" raid array, but they gave me some
hardware and said, "here, make this work".  (Anybody been THERE before?)

Anyway, I ended up with an Asus P3B-F with a 550 MHz P-III, 256MB and a pile
of SCSI disks.  I set up the hardware, the 2940U2W boards recognized all
the drives (yay!) and I proceded to install FreeBSD 4.0.  After creating
/dev entries for all the disks, I rebooted and saw listings for all the
drives scroll by and get logged in the messages file.  :-)

So, I proceeded to set up the disks with vinum.  That took me a while, but
thanks to some kind words from Greg Lehey, things moved along steadily.  I
set up a RAID5 plex and proceeded to run vinum's "init" command.

I came back later and the system had crashed with a page fault in kernel
mode error and was absolutely frozen at the "syncing disks" stage.  I power
cycled the box and this is what I got right after the POST:

int=00000000 err=00000000 efl=00030246 eip=00001b54
eax=00000000 ebx=00000386 ecx=00000000 edx=00000000
esi=00009ebd edi=00001a3e ebp=0000038e esp=00000382
cs=d000 ds=0040 es=9ebd fs=0000 gs=0000 ss=9ebd
cs:eip=f7 f1 33 d2 8a 4e f6 f7-f1 3d ff 03 76 03 b8 ff
ss:esp=00 00 3f 00 00 00 00 00-00 00 02 00 df 09 00 d0
system halted

I tried booting from the 4.0 CD and got the same message.  I booted from
a 3.4 CD and got a similar message (with ebx=38a, ebp=392 and esp=386).  I
tried various combinations of things, and I did get the system to boot,
but only when all of the external disks (the ones in the raid plex) were
turned off.  (I have an internal 4 GB SCSI drive as a boot device.)

I went back into the system and moved the boards around (now there are
2940U2W boards in PCI slots 2 and 3, there's an SMC 1211TX in PCI slot 5
and a Diamond SpeedStar A55 in the AGP slot.  As far as I can tell, there
should be no IRQ problems, but I still get that same error message at boot
up...

Is there some way to regain access to the disks?  Since I can't boot from
CD, is there something else to try?  Do I have to boot into DOS or Windows
and blow away all the partitions on the drives?  (BTW, if it matters,
they are IBM 36GB, 10,000 RPM drives...)

Anyone have any better ideas?  What does that boot message mean?

Thanks!

--
Doug Wellington                         System and Network Administrator
ddw@nsma.arizona.edu          The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA     


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