This is a final status report on the failure of DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 to install on my new Dell Precision 7920 workstation.
There appear to be two problems with my environment: the DragonFlyBSD installer does not recognize the Realtek USB controller on the Dell, nor does it recognize the SATA controller. By numerous experiments, we found that switching the keyboard from a USB one to a PS/2 one solved the no-keyboard-input problem. We successfully installed DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 on Crucial MX500 1TB SSD on a Lenovo ThinkCenter all-in-one workstation, and were able to boot that installation to a login prompt on both that system, and on a Mac Pro tower, confirming that both the USB stick with the installer and the Crucial SSD are OK. On the Dell, today we installed a new 2-port Inateck USB-3.0 PCI-E card, and plugged the keyboard and a Sabrent SATA-to-USB-3 box into that card. The system now boots to a login prompt on the Dell, and I've done extensive binary package installations, and a fresh build of the latest TeX Live 2020 source tree. The only drawback of this workaround is that the Crucial disk is accessed over a USB-3 connection, rather than a direct SATA connection. My thanks go to several list members for helpful offline correspondence that led to a solution! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: [email protected] - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 [email protected] [email protected] - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
