4 Troubleshooting

FreeBSD 5.0 and above makes extensive use of the system ACPI service on the i386, amd64 and ia64 platforms to aid in system configuration if it's detected during boot. Unfortunately, some bugs still exist in both the ACPI driver and within system motherboards and BIOS. The use of ACPI can be disabled by setting the “hint.acpi.0.disabled” hint in the third stage boot loader:

set hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"

This is reset each time the system is booted, so it is necessary to add hint.acpi.0.disabled="1" to the file /boot/loader.conf. More information about the boot loader can be found in the FreeBSD Handbook.

Some device drivers, like matcd, were removed over time due to lack of maintainership or other reasons. Others still exist but are disabled because of their intrusive hardware probe routines. The following ISA device drivers fall into this category and can re-enabled from the third stage boot loader: aha, ahv, aic, bt, ed, cs, sn, ie, fe, le, and lnc. To do this, stop the loader during it's 10 second countdown and enter the following at the prompt:

unset hint.foo.0.disabled

where foo is the name of the driver to re-enable. This can be set permanently by editing the file /boot/device.hints and removing the appropriate “disabled” entry.

There is a longstanding problem in the case where the boot disk is not the first disk in the system. The BIOS uses a different numbering scheme to FreeBSD, and working out which numbers correspond to which is difficult to get right.

In the case where the boot disk is not the first disk in the system, FreeBSD can need some help finding it. There are two common situations here, and in both of these cases, you need to tell FreeBSD where the root filesystem is. You do this by specifying the BIOS disk number, the disk type and the FreeBSD disk number for that type.

The first situation is where you have two IDE disks, each configured as the master on their respective IDE busses, and wish to boot FreeBSD from the second disk. The BIOS sees these as disk 0 and disk 1, while FreeBSD sees them as ad0 and ad2.

FreeBSD is on BIOS disk 1, of type ad and the FreeBSD disk number is 2, so you would say:

1:ad(2,a)kernel

Note that if you have a slave on the primary bus, the above is not necessary (and is effectively wrong).

The second situation involves booting from a SCSI disk when you have one or more IDE disks in the system. In this case, the FreeBSD disk number is lower than the BIOS disk number. If you have two IDE disks as well as the SCSI disk, the SCSI disk is BIOS disk 2, type da and FreeBSD disk number 0, so you would say:

2:da(0,a)kernel

To tell FreeBSD that you want to boot from BIOS disk 2, which is the first SCSI disk in the system. If you only had one IDE disk, you would use '1:' instead.

Once you have determined the correct values to use, you can put the command exactly as you would have typed it in the /boot.config file using a standard text editor. Unless instructed otherwise, FreeBSD will use the contents of this file as the default response to the boot: prompt.

The hard disk geometry was set incorrectly in the Partition editor when you installed FreeBSD. Go back into the partition editor and specify the actual geometry of your hard disk. You must reinstall FreeBSD again from the beginning with the correct geometry.

If you are failing entirely in figuring out the correct geometry for your machine, here's a tip: Install a small DOS partition at the beginning of the disk and install FreeBSD after that. The install program will see the DOS partition and try to infer the correct geometry from it, which usually works.

The following tip is no longer recommended, but is left here for reference:

If you are setting up a truly dedicated FreeBSD server or workstation where you don't care for (future) compatibility with DOS, Linux or another operating system, you've also got the option to use the entire disk (`A' in the partition editor), selecting the non-standard option where FreeBSD occupies the entire disk from the very first to the very last sector. This will leave all geometry considerations aside, but is somewhat limiting unless you're never going to run anything other than FreeBSD on a disk.

Set the hints “hint.mcd.0.disabled="1"” and “hint.mcd.1.disabled="1"” in the third stage boot loader to disable the probing of the mcd0 and mcd1 devices. Generally speaking, you should only leave the devices that you will be using enabled in your kernel.

Your card is probably on a different IRQ from what is specified in the /boot/device.hints file. The ed driver does not use the `soft' configuration by default (values entered using EZSETUP in DOS), but it will use the software configuration if you specify -1 in the hints for the interface.

Either move the jumper on the card to a hard configuration setting (altering the kernel settings if necessary), or specify the IRQ as -1 by setting the hint “hint.ed.0.irq="-1"” This will tell the kernel to use the soft configuration.

Another possibility is that your card is at IRQ 9, which is shared by IRQ 2 and frequently a cause of problems (especially when you have a VGA card using IRQ 2!). You should not use IRQ 2 or 9 if at all possible.

Older IBM laptops use a non-standard keyboard controller, so you must tell the keyboard driver (atkbd0) to go into a special mode which works on the ThinkPads. Set the hint “hint.atkbd.0.flags="4"” and it should work fine.

You must set your Intel EtherExpress 16 card to be memory mapped at address 0xD0000, and set the amount of mapped memory to 32K using the Intel supplied softset.exe program.

This is a known problem, and will hopefully be fixed in the future. In order to get your system installed at all, set the hint “hw.eisa_slots="12"” in the third stage loader.

Your machine doesn't like the new i586_copyout and i586_copyin code for some reason. To disable this, set the hint “hint.npx.0.flags="1"”

FreeBSD does not support this controller.

With Compaq being always a little different from other systems, they do not announce their floppy drive in the CMOS RAM of an Aero notebook. Therefore, the floppy disk driver assumes there is no drive configured. Set the hint “hint.fdc.0.flags="1"” This pretends the existence of the first floppy drive (as a 1.44 MB drive) to the driver without asking the CMOS at all.

Configure the DSA to use AHA-1540 emulation using EISA configuration utility. After that FreeBSD detects the DSA as an Adaptec AHA-1540 SCSI controller, with irq 11 and port 340. Under emulation mode system will use DSA RAID disks, but you cannot use DSA-specific features such as watching RAID health.

We don't understand why this happens. Neither do IBM (we asked them). The card is a standard Intel EtherExpress Pro/100 with an IBM label on it, and these cards normally work just fine. You may see these symptoms only in some IBM Netfinity servers. The only solution is to install a different Ethernet adapter.

There is a problem with the onboard Ethernet in the Netfinity 3500 which we have not been able to identify at this time. It may be related to the SMP features of the system being misconfigured. You will have to install another Ethernet adapter and avoid attempting to configure the onboard adapter at any time.

There is a bug in the Mylex driver which results in it ignoring the “8GB” geometry mode setting in the BIOS. Use the 2GB mode instead.