Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 09:59:20 -0700 (MST) From: Bruce Gingery <bgingery@gtcs.com> To: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Recommended addition to FAQ (Troubleshooting) Message-ID: <200002181659.JAA28578@ home.gtcs.com>
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I recently installed FreeBSD on my daughter's machine, remotely. She'd been on Windows3 since growing up and moving away from my NeXT, so "UNIX" wasn't a scary word to her, and she was getting tired of "Windows95 or better" on anything she was interested in, and certainly wanted "better" if she was going to change anyways. Well, just for a quickie, so she could play with it long enough to be familiar with it before moving on to FreeBSD, we tried to install Windows95, first. The install bombed three times, and we thought it was a scratched CD-ROM. VMM32 something-or-other failed to be installed each time, or so the bluescreen said AFTER what was supposedly a complete (minimal) install. So, boom, take the 3.2-STABLE diskettes I'd prepared ... boot up fine ... mfs mount CRASH.... Re-installed Windows3 (95 had thoroughly messed the drive) ... got back on line, got 3.4-RELEASE diskette images and fdimage.exe ... just to be sure, wrote the diskettes three times each from the .flp files. Again, good boot UNTIL the mfs mount. CRASH... So, Win3.1 was still installed on the hard drive, this time, downloaded 2.2.8 boot.flp in hopes that the smaller footprint would install (this is a K6-300 64Mx9-bit system with NO BIOS errors showing, and fast-boot turned off!). It did. Had slight problems getting PPP logged in (the username required a provider prefix). Started the install. Got to about slice 15 or so of the first distribution and BOOM... Kernel fault AGAIN! I can't praise highly enough, two software packages: http://reality.sgi.com/cbrady_denver/memtest86/ and http://www.qcc.sk.ca/~charlesc/software/memtester/ The former is a bootable image memory tester, built from some pieces of LiLo, Linux Kernel, and some good algorithms that sweep flat memory. The latter is a user-space utility that has different algorithms, and built for FreeBSD pretty easily (I've submitted my modifications to the author for a 2.2.8 build -- I don't have any hosts - yet - running 3.x). BOTH of these quickly identified flakey RAM that a supposedly full BIOS sweep of RAM totally missed, and that had caused "normal crashes" with her old Win3.1 installed. I'd really like to recommend that memtest86 be placed in tools/ from now on, including a pre-compiled .flp image. Anybody who's built a kern.flp and mfsroot.flp, or a boot.flp, will have NO problem creating a stand-alone i386 and up, memory tester from the "memtest.bin" file in the ZIP distribution, or the "precomp.bin" in the source .tar.gz Both are .flp images with a custom bootstrap loader. Similarly, I'd like to recommend that the user-space memtester be at LEAST added to the ports, although it wouldn't hurt to have it as a GPL'd part of the base distribution. For people who reboot rarely, it probably wouldn't hurt to run that one just before multiuser startup on every reboot. With the slight tweak I sent the author, the creation of a port for this should be trivial - and might not even be needed with the later FreeBSD versions. The reason I'm sending this to the DOC list, is that at a bare minimum, this info needs to be added to the FAQ and/or manual. To the hackers list because everybody reads it :) and I'm recommending changes to the distribution. Bruce Gingery <bgingery@gtcs.com> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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