Date: Mon, 19 Jun 1995 20:46:59 +0200 (MET DST) From: hm@ernie.altona.hamburg.com (Hellmuth Michaelis) To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Hackers) Subject: bad main memory and 2.0.5 Message-ID: <m0sNlqe-000209C@ernie.altona.hamburg.com>
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So i wanted to install 2.0.5 on a brand new Pentium HP Vectra VE 5/75 equipped
with some assorted peripherals and goodies on the mainboard.
The machine ran Windows without problems for a week now, and i left space on
a 2nd partition onto which i wanted to install 2.0.5 today.
When booting from the boot floppy, the install crashed or halted at several
stages:
- /: write: file system full
- page fault while in supervisor mode
- cursor in lower left with blue empty screen between pages, frozen
- unable to newfs the disk due to wrong disk geometry
- or simply just hanging somewhere in the menus
It was really getting frustrating.
Almost any time the machine froze, i was able to get a pop-up window when
pressing CTL-ALT-DEL ("Do you want to exit installation ?").
I removed every unused driver booting with -c, no change. I removed every
unused piece of hardware, no change.
At a time when there was nothing more to change but the CPU and the memory,
i replaced the memory - and - from then on i had NO problems installing
2.0.5 anymore. I could not believe it!
I checked other SIMM's but all other ran, with parity, without parity and
with dummy parity. The SIMM's which did not "run" were NEC chips, the ones
which do run are Goldstar and TI, ALL (!) of them with the same access time
of 70ns.
I still cannot believe it ...
Just a thought: in this situation i missed a menu item in the very first
install menu giving me just a shell. (Yes, i know ...)
Otherwise: very very well done! Congratulations core team! That must have
been very hard and boring work, but once it works ;-) it's very nice!
hellmuth
--
Hellmuth Michaelis hm@altona.hamburg.com Hamburg, Europe
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)nstall BSD ?
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