[geeks] FreeBSD advice please?

[Phil Stracchino]

So.  Some days you can't win for losing.

When I tried to install Solaris 10 on this thing NINE MONTHS AGO, all
the hardware worked fine.

First attempt at FreebSD boot, the 3ware 9500 BIOS comes up and flashes
by looking normal, system BIOS splash screen comes up and flashes by
looking normal and showing both 2.5" SATA disks (80GB, not 40GB; my
memory on that was in error) as hd0 and hd1, FreeBSD kernel boots
showing disks A and C through about P (it's apparently seeing the
floppy, both 80GB Seagates, and all twelve 300GB Maxtors exported from
the 3Ware).  So far, so good.  During probe, the 3ware (device twa0)
spews errors, system spews PCI errors, asks to have twa0 reseated, etc,
etc.  I power down and reseat the 3Ware card.

Second boot attempt, 3Ware BIOS comes up, BIOS version number appears to
be garbled.  I don't get a chance to go into 3ware setup and see what's
up.  System BIOS splash screen flashes by, FreeBSD kernel loads and
boots reporting drive A, C and D plus cd0.  Probe is much shorter and
does not spew errors.  It detects the 3Ware (twa0) and reads the BIOS
revision off it, but can't find a BIOS string.  I let it begin normal
install, and it gets as far as:


md0: Preloaded image </boot/mfsroot> 4423680 bytes at <address>
ad0: 76319MB <Seagate ST980811AS 3.BHE> at ata0-master SATA150
ad1: 76319MB <Seagate ST980811AS 3.BHE> at ata0-slave SATA150

According to the docs, what I SHOULD see next is:

Mounting root from ufs:/dev/md0c
/stand/sysinstall running as init on vty0

Instead, it hangs.

I wonder if I have a bad disk locking up the bus on the 3ware.  I power
down, eject all twelve 300GB disks, boot.  This time, I don't see any
3Ware BIOS come up at all.  It gets to the same point, and hangs.  twa0
still shows up on probe and still looks sane except for that "cannot
find BIOS string".

I reboot.  Same result.

I power down, physically unplug the 3Ware card, and reboot.  Same
result.  No errors are reported.  It just ... stops instead of mounting
root.


Any suggestions?  Did I somehow burn a coaster that doesn't *appear* to
be a coaster?  I even dd'd an iso back off the CD I burned and compared
it to the original ISO ... they're byte-for-byte identical, which argues
against undetected coasterage.  This is an SMP box (two 3.2GHz Xeons
with hyperthreading); is there something special I need to do at
bootloader time to get a kernel aware of all four "logical processors"?



-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.