FreeBSD 8.1 install stops at "/stand/sysinstall running as init on vty0"

[essoft]

Hi,

When trying to install FreeBSD 8.1 on my server using the boot only CDROM the boot process gets as far as

/stand/sysinstall running as init on vty0

and then stops.

The system has not completely frozen, I can still switch between terminals and if I press Ctrl+Alt+Delete I get a menu with options to Abort, Restart or Continue the installation, however Restart just outputs the

/stand/sysinstall running as init on vty0

message again and does nothing further.

The server has a Arima RioWorks HDAMA Rev-G Dual AMD Opteron board running the 2.18b BIOS with 2GB of RAM. The RAM passes memtest86+ after multiple passes and I have tried booting FreeBSD with both a single and dual Opteron 280 CPUs installed. I have also tried various combinations of BIOS options, including disabling USB support and the SATA controller.

As I seemed to be getting some APIC errors on boot I have also tried booting with APIC disabled, and also with APIC and ACPI disabled - however disabling either of these causes it to freeze completely after a

md0: Preloaded image </boot/mfsroot> 4194304 bytes at 0xffffffff80e6aa98

message.

I have attached some images of the final screen of output when booting in verbose mode with default options in the first image (IMAG0074.jpg), and with APIC and ACPI disabled in the second image (IMAG0077.jpg).

Thanks.

 

[essoft]

Hi,

Just a quick update. I have now added 2GB of RAM to the server in addition to the 2GB I had before, so the memory is now filling all the memory slots for CPU0 (only one CPU installed at the moment). With this extra memory installed the FreeBSD installer works normally! I tried removing it again and got the same problem, then when I put it back it worked again.

Any idea what might be causing this to happen? I'm guessing perhaps it's simply due to some faulty memory, however it did all pass memtest86 tests and I haven't removed any of the modules only added two more.

Thanks.