Date: Sun, 3 Mar 1996 17:04:57 +0000 (GMT) From: Kevin Quinlan <Kevin.Quinlan@isltd.insignia.com> To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith) Cc: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu, gpalmer@FreeBSD.ORG, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Kernel panic installing FreeBSD 2.1 Message-ID: <20166.9603031704@ferrari.isltd.insignia.com> In-Reply-To: <199602230110.LAA20829@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Feb 23, 96 11:40:38 am
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Hi, Thanks for all your help recently with our FreeBSD 2.1 install problem. The problem is not yet fixed, but I think we are narrowing in on it. Just a quick recap: our PCI P100 machine, with Seagate drives, Panasonic CDROM on a Buslogic 946C SCSI controller, with 3C509 ethernet and 32Mb memory will not allow FreeBSD to be installed on it. The install process generally crashes with a kernel panic after a page fault, but can simply hang, particularly if the caches are turned off. > I would actually be suspecting your RAM, your cache or your motherboard > chipset. We have tried a different motherboard with and without cache without success. The RAM has not been changed (yet). > > I think it could be having problems, the disk is a Seagate Hawk ST > > 31230N, the real geometry is 3992/5/103 we have tried 1010/64/32 (DOS > > likes this) and 998/40/51 with no success. > > Which disk controller are you using? See recap above. > > I have also tried disabling the caches in the BIOS, but the results > > were similar in that the install failed, but it seemed to hang rather > > than generate a page fault that panics the kernel. > > Definitely a hardware problem. > I'm coming in on this late, so a quick list of CPU, motherboard, chipset, > disk controller would be helpful. The machine has had two different motherboards so far with different chipsets, although offhand at the moment I cannot name any of these components, the machine has gone back to our supplier to get a working configuration. I actually suspect the disk controller, because I did get a chance to install the software on a similar machine with an Adpatec PCI SCSI controller and a Conner drive of some sort and 80Mb of memory, and it installed perfectly, so I don't believe that I am doing anything stupid, and yet I continually get problems getting the disk partitions set up on the failing machine, I sometimes get a failure where the / partition fills up. But I have not gone back and re-formatted the disk after every failure, so it may be seeing some previous data. Regardless, we now know a few more things to try in order to get this machine going, but I thought I should let you know why I have not reported back before now. Regards Kevin Quinlan -- Kevin.Quinlan@isltd.insignia.com Kevin.Quinlan@insignia.co.uk
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