FreeBSD hangs on boot

[Bubba_HoTep]

Gidday FreeBSDers

I've a FreeBSD 7.0 64 bit server which has a boot problem that is driving me nuts.

It takes multiple gos to boot successfully. Most times it just hangs, always at the same point in the boot sequence -

firewire 0: bus manager 0 (me)

I have to kill the power and reboot and eventually I get lucky and it boots.

This didn't bother me so much cos once booted the server stayed on - but I'm testing an UPS with the box and need to reboot to test my shutdown scripts - and it's getting to be a real pain.

I also suspect that my hitting the power switch may be causing filesystem corruption - my first post on this board http://www.daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=2342 was about this. I fixed that problem with a fsck - only for the problem to reappear.

The OS disk is a 4Gb CF card - and so I don't have a swap partition. The CF card I haven't set ro yet as I'm still messing about with bits and pieces.

All the hardware (apart from the CF card) is known to be good as this box was running problem free with Linux before i wiped it and put on FreeBSD.

When the server boots its runs fine (apart from the FS errors noted above)

dmesg doesn't throw up any errors that I can see either...


As I see it there's 3 possible causes:

1) Something wrong with my CF card (which would explain FS errors)

2) something wrong with my FreeBSD install

3) something that I haven't thought of


Can anyone shed any light?

[J65nko]

Can you disable firewire in the BIOS?
You could download a 7.1BETA2 snapshot, install it and see whether your issue is solved. See ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/re...SO-IMAGES/7.1/

[Bubba_HoTep]

I'm still having problems with this.

It seems FreeBSD doesn't like my hardware.

I disabled firewire and what the hell I disabled the parallel ports as well.

No difference.

Next I swapped out the Transcend CF card for a different brand - Sandisk.
Installing FreeBSD on the Sandisk CF went smoothly and it booted ok for the first few times.

Now however i can't get FreeBSD to boot at all on either the Transcend or Sandisk cards.

On another Sandisk card i have a Linux OS which boots ok.

The motherboard is an Intel, there isn't any exotic hardware hanging off it.

Has anyone any ideas what I can try next?

[mdh]

This should probably get a PR. It seems like a race condition.

I've heard of similar issues where a piece of hardware existed in the system (in that case, a gem ethernet controller) and that driver was not enabled in the kernel. Perhaps try creating a very liberal kernel where you're absolutely sure it had drivers compiled in for all of the hardware the system has.

Regardless, it probably needs a PR to get fixed.