Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2000 18:07:02 -0800 (PST) From: Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu> To: Paul Saab <paul@mu.org> Cc: Mike Smith <msmith@mass.osd.bsdi.com>, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Really odd "BTX halted" problem booting FreeBSD on VALinux hardware Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0010291800190.54838-100000@resnet.uoregon.edu> In-Reply-To: <20001027012522.A96576@elvis.mu.org>
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On Fri, 27 Oct 2000, Paul Saab wrote:
> Mike Smith (msmith@mass.osd.bsdi.com) wrote:
> > >
> > > :I'm just curious. How many disks are in this box? We saw something
> > > :similar here at work and it turned out that there were multiple disklabels
> > > :on the other disks and for somereason it was confusing the loader.
> > > :We dd'd the bad sections off and everything worked.
> >
> > Are you sure it's confusing the loader? Matt's fault address puts it in
> > the BIOS at 0xc800, which is probably the SCSI adapter's BIOS...>
>
> I wasn't 100% involved with the problem. Peter looked into and notice
> the disks had bogus labels (sometimes up to 3 labels on 1 disk) and when
> he removed them, the machines were happy again. We never looked into
> further because we just didn't have the time.
I know I'm getting into this late but I can reliably reproduce this
problem. I ran into it about 3 months ago when using a custom PXE-based
installer for our SCSI boxes. I even annoyed -hackes and got John Baldwin
to help me decode the register dumps. The IP does end up in the SCSI BIOS
extension somewhere, which is really scary.
To do it:
1. Pick a motherboard with built-in SCSI; the L440GX+ for instance. Put
2 or more disks on a controller.
2. Set the disks up dangerously dedicated, i.e. don't put proper MS
partition tables on the disks.
3. Try to boot the box; watch BTX die in the same place every time.
The Adaptec BIOS is doing something really fugly when it doesn't find
proper partition tables on the disks.
It does it if ANY of the disks are done 'dangerously dedicated.'
The easy solution: always put proper partitions on your disks.
The hard solution: figure out what nastiness Adaptec is doing and slap
their hand.
Doug White | FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | www.FreeBSD.org
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