FreeBSD 9-RELEASE Installer hangs

iainnitro

iainnitro

Greetings:

I am working on installing FreeBSD 9-Release on my system and the installer hangs right at the menu screen. The menu does not even get loaded fully.

My System is as follows:

I have an unknown ASUS video card PCI-E (plan to replace it this month, this one is a stopgap. It works with all Linux distros I have tried).

Gigabyte GA-M68MT-S2P mainboard (nforce 630a chipset)
AMD Phenom II X4 860
4 GB RAM
Sony DVD-RW
Seagate 1 TB SATA hard drive

I have checked the BIOS settings and found that the system is NOT setup for SATA RAID.

Would appreciate any help in getting this to work.

Thanks,

Mike
 
Installing from thumbdrive (memstick img) or dvd? Disabling firewire in bios? usb or ps/2 keyboard? Temporarily using onboard video if any? is the DVD sata or ide? (Clueless to reply to your replies though, I have mostly just upgraded not initially installed, beyond sysinstall with disks, ever.) Which reminds me, are you using the v9 installer or the v9 legacy sysinstall application? ( Maybe a clueless on my part question also...)
 
Thanks jb_fvwm2 for the reply! I suppose some of that would be helpful. The whole system is SATA (so both my hard drive and DVD-RW are SATA drives). I have not tried to use the onboard video because it is normally X-Windows unfriendly. The video card that is currently installed seems to be okay with all distros of Linux I have thrown at this machine.

The install disk is the AMD64 ISO DVD.

Hope that helps a bit.

Thanks,

Mike
 
Hey ALl, just an update. The video card is an ATI Radeon X300 made by ASUS. The other hardware in the system is an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 and a Firewire 400 card (VIA chipset). The FreeBSD installer hangs at the time it is drawing the install menu and just for kicks tried the PC-BSD 9 disk and it hangs at the BIOS Drive C: message. The machine is definitely got something installed that is causing the CD Loader to puke.

I do have a list of the hardware verbatim from lshw on the Linux installation that is currently running on this box.

BTW: Plan to change the video card to a NVIDIA Quadro FX1800 in the next couple of weeks.

AGAIN, hope someone can help, as I REALLY want to run FreeBSD again.
 
There was(is) a firewire (v9) workaround, but if you can temporarily remove the card AND disable it in bios both, it MAY fix it. No guarantees though.
 
So after FreeBSD is installed, the firewire card will be okay?

I have not a problem removing it temporarily... but definitely need it later on. Use it with my camcorder quite a bit.

Thanks,

Mike
 
Okay, no difference with or without fire card installed. Not sure how to describe the hanging, but the menu is transposed over the loader information. Obvious I can not get a screen grab, but the menu is on top of the messages from the CD Loader and the cursor just sits in the bottom left corner blinking indefinitely.
 
Install v8, use its sysinstall to upgrade-in-place to v9? Maybe easier to figure out how to load some ko that may be missing for the install CD before it starts the install program geom_mbr.ko geom_bsd.ko geom_label.ko. Remove the hard drive to install from another machine? Use the usb memory stick image instead?
Sorry to just mention terse, unobvious, difficult methods[1] , but I've only basically ever upgraded-in-place (sometimes very unconventionally, in ways probably useful to some on the forum, but I've no time to put together anything exact enough beyond posts I've made...) since v5.
[1] difficult unless they work. Then they have proved useful.
 
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