Something wrong after startup

[monty0]

I'm installing 9.0 on a mac mini. Near the end of the boot process I see a message:

Starting sshd.
Starting cron.
Starting background file system checks in 60 seconds.

I then get the login prompt. It seems I have about 10 seconds before the computer freezes. If I don't type anything in it will freeze at the prompt. If I'm quick I can log in and then it will freeze as I'm typing in my first command. When it is frozen I cannot ping the machine or connect to ssh either.

I can boot -s and stay in single user mode as long as I want.

Are there places I can look for logs to see if I can track this down?

Perhaps 9.0 is too new and I should try 8.2 instead?

Thanks for any advice,

Monty

[phoenix]

Add background_fsck="NO" to /etc/rc.conf

[monty0]

I added background_fsck="NO" to /etc/rc.conf. At startup it no longer says it will do background fsck.

However I still have the same problem. Now it says:
Starting cron.
Starting sshd.

then it gives the login prompt. By the time it takes to type in my user/pass it has locked up.

Looking at /var/log/messages shows normal boot stuff, I didn't see any errors or panics. The last thing in there is ntpd printing out its version number.

Anything else worth trying?

Thanks,

Monty

[SirDice]

Boot to single user mode and do a proper fsck. Your drive may have some errors which causes the whole thing to lockup.

[monty0]

I tried booting into single user mode and doing fsck. It still locked up a few seconds after getting to the login prompt.

[SirDice]

You shouldn't get a login prompt in single user mode.

[monty0]

I get into single user mode with boot -s. I can stay in single user mode as long as I want without it locking up. I can fsck, remount the filesystem for writing, edit /etc/rc.conf and play around there. Once I exit single user mode it continues the boot process and then shortly after it gets to the login prompt it will lock up.

[SirDice]

Ok, that means it's probably something in /etc/rc.conf that gets loaded.

[monty0]

Apparently it was the ntpd. My clock battery in this computer is dead. I had set the option ntpd_sync_on_start="YES" in hopes it would trigger ntpd -g. I guess something was wrong there. I ended up re-installing and not enabling ntpd, and it is working as expected.