Hi all,

I need some help. I've been googling for a while now, and no dice. When I try the 6.1 installer cd, or even the bootonly cd, the installation is hanging at the point where it would normally bring up beastie.4th and the loader. I think it's hardware related, because I can eject the cd, and the baton will start to slowly spin until it says "beastie.4th not found" or kernel not found, depending on when and what order I eject and/or replace the cd. At any rate, I went into the bios, but it's a Phoenix bios that has very few things I can turn off or configure (it's like idiot lights in a car...I *hate* that). I tried turning off the legacy usb, but it made no difference. I can't control eisa probing or anything.

FWIW, both DesktopBSD and PC-BSD have installed fine on it. But I am doing a fresh install with good old vanilla FreeBSD...or so I hope...

Also, I checked the ISO's md5sums, and they are right, and I get the same result from 2 different disks, so I assume that the chances of 2 bad burns on 2 separate bootdisks and 2 separate ISO's properly checksummed would be nil.

Here is the exact message, since I can't post a pic of it here:

CD Loader 1.2

Building the boot loader arguments
Looking up /BOOT/LOADER....Found
Relocating the loader and the BTX
Starting the BTX loader

BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.01
Consoles: internal video/keyboard
BIOS CD is cd0
BIOS drive C: is disk0
BIOS 638kB/513920kB available memory

FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader, Revision 1.1
(root@opus.cse.buffalo.edu, Sun May 7 03:20:03 UTC 2006)
|

I let it set at one point for about 2 hrs; the baton did "twirl" about half a turn over that time; and the cd drive lights flash occasionally. But other than that, she's hung. And at this point in the boot, I can't get to any kind of command line to enter a code (unless there's just something I don't know.)

Can anyone help, or am I S.O.L? Thanks so much in advance!

Dan

First off, try escaping to the loader prompt and type without the quotes 'unset acpi_load' and 'set hw.pci.enable_io_modes=0'. Also try the verbose boot and see if you get a hint what it's choking on.

Thanks so much for the input; I'll try it. I assume you mean, when it hangs, eject the cd and let it go to a prompt, then do those?

Assuming I'm correct in my understanding, after I unset... and then do the set..., then what do I do to get back to the cd to boot? i.e., what follows boot to make it go back to the cd?

Thanks again,
Dan

No, sorry I should have explained how to escape to the boot prompt. When you begin the boot process you are given a timeout period, hit the space bar and you should be presented with a prompt that looks like this:

Type '?' for a list of commands, 'help' for more detailed help
OK

At the OK prompt type unset acpi_load and set set hw.pci.enable_io_modes=0. Once that is done type boot -v.

Sorry to sound so dumb...but when the boot process starts, it goes through those first BTX loader-stuff-steps, then immediately goes to where it's hanging (i.e., it's not making it far enough to be able to get to a time-out). Or is this right at the very, very beginning (i.e., I'd maybe not even catch it, but should start hitting the space bar over and over until I catch it?).

Thanks so much for the help, and sorry for asking so many dumb questions. I've just not gotten hung here before...

:-)
d

You may want to fire off an email to freebsd-questions@ to see if anyone may know of a workaround. I thought you were at least getting to the boot menu

No, unfortunately. I also posted the same over at bsdforums, but there, I was able to include a screenshot. If you want, search for my name over there (geocritter), and you should be able to find it. It's a lousy photo, but it captured the text better than some of the others that I tried...

Thanks again for the info,
Dan

Try this, explore your installation CD and browse to the boot directory and edit the loader.conf file with MS Write if your on MS, don't use notepad. In that file add the following:

hw.pci.enable_io_modes="0"
hw.pci.allow_unsupported_io_range="1"

Good luck

I like that idea (I was wondering about that last night), but how can I do that with an ISO file; or would I have to make a *new* iso file afterwards? And how would I do that...

I don't think your image on the CD will become corrupt by editing what essentially is a plain text file, you should not need to create a new iso afterwards.

No, I mean how do i directly edit a file within an .iso? I tried to extract it, but it wants to do a bunch of overwrites (huh? it's extracting...why would it want to overwrite something within the extracted folder with itself???)(for example, /usr/bin/cc). At any rate, if I can find a way to "view" the contents of the .iso, then maybe I can figure out how to "edit" the sucker. I'm familiar with the loader.conf, and can add in as you said then reburn it.

Mount the CD you made and copy the directory of it to a temporary location, cd into that directory and find the file you need to edit. Use mkisofs to recreate the iso image.

You know...now I feel REALLY stupid. Copy the files off of the cd, make the changes, then use whatever program to create a new iso. DUH (dan slaps his own forehead).

Is it Friday yet???

Thanks so much for the info. I'll try it and see how it goes...

It's friday, how did the installation work out for you? I hope you got past the BTX loader by this point. If not this really deserves an email to the FreeBSD questions or stable list so a fix can be implemented.

First of all, lemme apologize for being so rude as to not post what happened. I basically got busy at work then came home to a wife who has strep throat, so I never got around to it and forgot. All I can say is, oops!

Ok...well, guess what? I discovered the problem when I put the cd in to cp the files off of. It didn't want to read. Neither did the second disk. Or the netinstall disk.

Three dud disks. I couldn't believe it. So...after shaking my head in disbelief at all of my own wasted time (and yours, for that matter), I got 3 more disks of a different brand, cooked 'em lickety split, and had the whole system installed an hour later. I've not had time to configure it, but it does boot.

Sigh...TGIF!

Thanks again for helping me out,
Dan