Over some time I've installed various versions of FreeBSD. In the past installation has always gone smoothly.
Now however, I'm trying to setup a new system on a new machine with software RAID 1 (vinum) and have run into difficulties (which I don't think have anything to do with vinum). The new machine is based on a P4SGL-VM mother board with a 1.7G Celeron processor and 256Mb RAM. Two WDC WD1200JB-00DUA3 (120Gb) drives are installed on the primary and secondary IDE master ports with 80 conductor cables. During installation it seemed to be difficult to move sysinstall on from the fdisk and MBR dialogues to the the disklabel dialogue; it seemed to want to always loop back to the beginning of the fdisk dialogue. But after a number of false starts managed to get a developer (without X) system installed on slice ad0s1 of about 6Gb. After some fiddling with with vinum in ad0s2 and ad2s2 I reset vinum (resetconfig) and discarded these slices. On ad2 I created one large slice and labeled it with a view to vinum with ad2s1a having an offset of 281 blocks and the vinum partition an offset of 16 blocks. After creating a filesystem on ad2s1a and mounting on /mnt I attempted to copy the root partition from the axisting system using: # cd /mnt # dump -0 -a -f - / | restore -f - which reported an error something like: expected file 223455: found 223456 which (unfortunately) I didn't record so is only an approximation. # fsck -n /dev/ad0s1a reported an inconsistency but without any real detail. Rerunning # fsck /dev/ad0s1a whether or not in single user mode reported (NO WRITE) and declined to fix the problem. When attempting to write directly to an unmounted slice or partition: # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0s2 count=50 I get a message to the effect that the filesystem is readonly and a console message: fixlabel: invalid magic and on searching the kernel source I find it in /usr/src/kernel/subr_diskslice.c preceded by the comment /* These errors "can't happen" so don't bother reporting details. */ The problem has appeared on both drives. However fdisk and disklabel do not "seem" to have problems writing. History: ====== I first attempted to set this up on another machine with the same brand of mother board but slightly different -- significant to us it had an onboard network interface. On that board (same drives) I was the installation could not access the hard drives until UDMA was disabled in the BIOS. Nor could the installed system operate with UDMA turned on. Stuck with PIO4 I abandoned that machine. (While I considered that a CD as slave on one of the IDE ports might create UDMA difficulties on one hard drive it does not explain, to me, lack of access to the other hard drive.) The above is of course a very much cut down version of events. The cost of the time spent messing about with these system has been much greater than the cost of the hardware! Do I have faulty hardware? Or is the hardware incompatible with FreeBSD? Is the hardware simply rubbish? Am I being stupid? Does any one have good or bad experience with these mother boards? Does anyone understand what is happening? Information: ========= # dmesg -> Copyright (c) 1992-2003 The FreeBSD Project. Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE #0: Thu Apr 3 10:53:38 GMT 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 1.70GHz (1715.28-MHz 686-class CPU) Origin = "GenuineIntel" Id = 0xf13 Stepping = 3 Features=0x3febfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE, MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM> real memory = 234864640 (229360K bytes) avail memory = 223227904 (217996K bytes) Preloaded elf kernel "kernel" at 0xc051d000. Pentium Pro MTRR support enabled md0: Malloc disk Using $PIR table, 6 entries at 0xc00f1930 npx0: <math processor> on motherboard npx0: INT 16 interface pcib0: <Host to PCI bridge> on motherboard pci0: <PCI bus> on pcib0 agp0: <SIS Generic host to PCI bridge> mem 0xe8000000-0xebffffff at device 0.0 on pci0 pcib2: <PCI to PCI bridge (vendor=1039 device=0001)> at device 1.0 on pci0 pci1: <PCI bus> on pcib2 pci1: <SiS model 6325 VGA-compatible display device> at 0.0 irq 11 isab0: <PCI to ISA bridge (vendor=1039 device=0961)> at device 2.0 on pci0 isa0: <ISA bus> on isab0 ohci0: <SiS 5571 USB controller> mem 0xe7000000-0xe7000fff irq 3 at device 2.2 on pci0 usb0: OHCI version 1.0, legacy support usb0: <SiS 5571 USB controller> on ohci0 usb0: USB revision 1.0 uhub0: SiS OHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1 uhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered ohci1: <SiS 5571 USB controller> mem 0xe6800000-0xe6800fff irq 6 at device 2.3 on pci0 usb1: OHCI version 1.0, legacy support usb1: <SiS 5571 USB controller> on ohci1 usb1: USB revision 1.0 uhub1: SiS OHCI root hub, class 9/0, rev 1.00/1.00, addr 1 uhub1: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered atapci0: <SiS 5591 ATA100 controller> port 0xb800-0xb80f at device 2.5 on pci0 ata0: at 0x1f0 irq 14 on atapci0 ata1: at 0x170 irq 15 on atapci0 pci0: <unknown card> (vendor=0x1039, dev=0x7012) at 2.7 irq 5 rl0: <RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX> port 0x9800-0x98ff mem 0xe5800000-0xe58000ff irq 10 at device 15.0 on pci0 rl0: Ethernet address: 00:50:fc:a8:3e:08 miibus0: <MII bus> on rl0 rlphy0: <RealTek internal media interface> on miibus0 rlphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto rl1: <RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX> port 0x9400-0x94ff mem 0xe5000000-0xe50000ff irq 12 at device 16.0 on pci0 rl1: Ethernet address: 00:50:fc:a6:f9:f1 miibus1: <MII bus> on rl1 rlphy1: <RealTek internal media interface> on miibus1 rlphy1: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto pcib1: <SiS 5591 host to AGP bridge> on motherboard pci2: <PCI bus> on pcib1 orm0: <Option ROM> at iomem 0xc0000-0xcbfff on isa0 fdc0: cannot reserve interrupt line atkbdc0: <Keyboard controller (i8042)> at port 0x60,0x64 on isa0 atkbd0: <AT Keyboard> flags 0x1 irq 1 on atkbdc0 kbd0 at atkbd0 vga0: <Generic ISA VGA> at port 0x3c0-0x3df iomem 0xa0000-0xbffff on isa0 sc0: <System console> at flags 0x100 on isa0 sc0: VGA <16 virtual consoles, flags=0x300> sio0 at port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 flags 0x10 on isa0 sio0: type 16550A sio1: configured irq 3 not in bitmap of probed irqs 0 ppc0: <Parallel port> at port 0x378-0x37f irq 7 on isa0 ppc0: SMC-like chipset (ECP/EPP/PS2/NIBBLE) in COMPATIBLE mode ppc0: FIFO with 16/16/16 bytes threshold plip0: <PLIP network interface> on ppbus0 lpt0: <Printer> on ppbus0 lpt0: Interrupt-driven port ppi0: <Parallel I/O> on ppbus0 ad0: 114440MB <WDC WD1200JB-00DUA3> [232514/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA100 ad2: 114440MB <WDC WD1200JB-00DUA3> [232514/16/63] at ata1-master UDMA100 acd0: CDROM <ATAPI-CD ROM-DRIVE-52MAX> at ata1-slave PIO4 Mounting root from ufs:/dev/ad0s1a If you have any thoughts (on these issues) please respond. Malcolm Kay _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"