Just put together a nice 1U box, Tyan Tank GT20, plugged in its 8gb ECC RAM, its 4 shiney new HDs and fired it up. Bios looks normal, reset the clock to something resembling today, and throw in the Fbsd7 disk! No joy. I get just a hint of a "booting" line, then an instant reboot, or with a 6 disk, I get a scrolling mess that I have no idea what it says. My question, has anyone got fbsd running on one of these chipsets? If so, how did you do it? Tried 7 release in i386 and amd64 version, and v6 i386. They all do the same thing. (it will run the misc test CDs I have here just fine, even let it do most of a WinXP install with no issues, so I don't really believe it to be a hardware issue) Tyan Tank GT20 model B5211 Tyan Toledo i3200R m/b Intel 3200 MCH chipset. Help? Dave Overton, Owner SYIX.COM dave@syix.com (530) 755-1751 x101 Fax (530) 751-8871 800-988-SYIX
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 06:19:00PM -0700, Dave Overton wrote:> Just put together a nice 1U box, Tyan Tank GT20, plugged in its 8gb ECC RAM, > its 4 shiney new HDs and fired it up. Bios looks normal, reset the clock to > something resembling today, and throw in the Fbsd7 disk! > > No joy. > > I get just a hint of a "booting" line, then an instant reboot, or with a 6 > disk, I get a scrolling mess that I have no idea what it says.Sounds like bootloader/BTX problems. The "scrolling mess" is probably a register dump; another common one is a sporadic reboot, case in point. Don't let the 2nd thread below make you think "USB pen drives have nothing to do with my server"; BTX is used everywhere: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2008-March/041272.html http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2008-March/041112.html John Baldwin just recently committed some fixes in this regard, to both CURRENT, RELENG_6, and RELENG_7, which might fix the problem you're seeing. No promises though. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/boot/i386/btx/btx/ The commit to CURRENT was done on March 10th. The commit to RELENG_7 was done on March 18th. The commit to RELENG_6 was done on March 18th. I'd recommend trying out one of the snapshot ISOs, except that all of the ISOs are from March 11th, which means the only images which *might* have the fixes applied are for CURRENT. ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/200803/ If you're feeling spunky, I'd try the CURRENT bootonly snapshot solely to see if it boots for you. I would NOT recommend installing CURRENT on your brand new production server. :-) ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/200803/8.0-CURRENT-200803-amd64-bootonly.iso I can't guarantee that the ISO will fix the problem for you; it's possible the ISO was made based on code from prior to March 10th, and it's also possible the problem you're having are unrelated to the the fixes John did. -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
On Tuesday 25 March 2008 09:19:00 pm Dave Overton wrote:> Just put together a nice 1U box, Tyan Tank GT20, plugged in its 8gb ECC > RAM, its 4 shiney new HDs and fired it up. Bios looks normal, reset > the clock to something resembling today, and throw in the Fbsd7 disk! > > No joy. > > I get just a hint of a "booting" line, then an instant reboot, or with > a 6 disk, I get a scrolling mess that I have no idea what it says.Partly guessing, but this sounds like the real-mode BTX bootloader issue. It's become increasingly common on newer hardware, and it's not limited to USB devices like it used to be. Fortunately, there is a good chance that jhb's recent BTX overhaul will fix it. Unfortunately, it was only committed to -CURRENT two weeks ago and MFC'ed to RELENG_6 and RELENG_7 one week ago so I doubt there's a ready-to-use snapshot CD you can download that includes it. If it were me I'd create a bootable USB stick (on another machine) to verify that you can boot the server with the latest boot blocks, then use it to do a manual install (or at least bootstrap the process). But that's just me--I like that sort of thing. It's also possible to roll your own installation CD but I've never done.it. I do recall someone posting an link to an image to one of the mailing lists, but IIRC that was with a BTX patch older than the one that actually got committed. Probably someone else on this list has a better suggestion. JN> My question, has anyone got fbsd running on one of these chipsets? If > so, how did you do it? Tried 7 release in i386 and amd64 version, and > v6 i386. They all do the same thing. > > (it will run the misc test CDs I have here just fine, even let it do > most of a WinXP install with no issues, so I don't really believe it to > be a hardware issue) > > Tyan Tank GT20 model B5211 > Tyan Toledo i3200R m/b > Intel 3200 MCH chipset.