freebsd stable - Jan 2006 - 6.0 hangs at boot on Toshiba laptop

Hi everybody,

I tried to install on my laptop (Toshiba M60-176) FreeBSD 6.0 STABLE and 
it failed despite careful installation and web/archives search. It is a 
multiboot installation (Windows XP/Linux Ubuntu/FreeBSD) driven by GRUB 
4.95.

After the whole installation process ended, the reboot is performed and 
the bootstrap goes until the FreeBSD menu is displayed. Whatever the 
chosen option (default, without ACPI, fail-safe, verbose, etc.) the 
system hangs immediately. For example with the first choice, we have :
/boot/kernel/acpi.ko/boot/kernel/acpi.ko text=0x40c2c data=0x2160+0x1090 
[..] and everything stops. The situation is explained very clearly here 
: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=freebsd-mobile&m=113177565322135&w=2

I do not think it is related to GRUB (the real boot has started, this 
version allows for UFS2 access, various GRUB settings have been tried, 
unsucessfully) nor to ACPI since even when disabled, thanks to the 
relevant menu option, the boot hangs as well (same behaviour, without 
the ACPI module line being displayed). I cannot disable Legacy USB in my 
BIOS, if ever it was a common workaround.

If it can help, I detailed my full installation process here : 
http://osdl.sourceforge.net/OSDL/OSDL-0.3/src/doc/web/main/documentation/misc/Toshiba.html#freebsd
(by the way, there seems to be a bug when aborting/restarting under 
sysinstall : apparently in some cases it tries to install FreeBSD on the 
ramdisk instead of the requested slice).

Thanks in advance for any hint,
kind regards,

Olivier.

This looks like the problem I have with 5.4-STABLE after a kernel change 
on 9/5/2005 to /usr/src/sys/dev/pci/pci.c.

The sysclt paramater "hw.pci.enable_io_modes" is supposed to allow PCs
with "lazy" BIOSes to boot, but this setting had no effect on my 8100.

If your problem is the same as mine then I'm not sure what, if anything, 
you can do to get 6.X to boot.  In my case I can bootstrap from 5.X to 
6.X, assuming I figure out how to kludge my way around the 8100 BIOS 
problem on 6.X.

My original message had "Toshiba 8100 Fix" at the beginning of the
subject
line.  There was related material with "changes breaks IDE boot" in
the
subject line, also.

Mike Squires