Installation discs and all types of live cd's hang with Compaq Presario laptop

W

winbsdman

I'm new to the FreeBSD OS and I'm trying to get it installed on a Compaq Presario M2105US laptop I have. I've been having trouble with the installation process when trying to boot off of cd's. I can get to the boot menu with the 7 options that include normal mode, acpi disabled, safe mode, single user mode, etc. Afterwards when any of the options are chosen with the exception of the loader prompt, the messages probing the hardware are displayed on the screen. Then the process hangs while this is occuring.

I have used the FreeBSD 7.0 release installation CD disc1, the FreeBSD live FS cd 7.1 Release, and a FreesBIE 2.1 disc which is based on Freebsd 6.2-Release. The errors that occur are the following:

with the disc1, hangs at:

Timecounters tick every 1.000mec
hptrr:no controller detected

when options 1,2, or 4 are chosen. When option 3 is chosen, it it hangs at:

sio0: at port 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 flags 0x10 on isa0
sio0: type 8250 or not responding

when option 5 is chosen, it hangs at:

lo0:bpf attached
hptrr: no controller detected


On the 7.1 livefs discs, for options 1,2, and 4, it hangs one line above at the:

timecounters tick every 1.000msec

for options 3, and 5, it hangs at the same place as on the 7.0 release disc 1.

I tried a FreesBie disc and that hangs on all options at the white and red splash screen. Also tried to boot to a loader prompt, and used the the "set hw.ata.atapi_dma=0" command before typing boot but the same thing happened as always.

I believe the problem is possiblly related to the OS not recognizing the hard drive controller or hard drive. I have no problem with Windows or Linux live cd's. In Device manager in Windows, it does not list any specific make or type for the hard drive controllers., just primary ide channel, secondary ide channel, and standard dual channel pc IDE Controller.

Your help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
 
okay, the reference that was provided in the reply contained hints relating to pae.


There are some things I'm wondering though:

as a laptop, I have no scsi interface, this laptop uses a AMD sempron chip, has 1 gb of ram, and if having pae enabled is causing the issue, how can I disable it in the install to get the os onto the machine??


thanks.
 
Install cd's do not contain PAE kernels. They use GENERIC.

Also, the hptrr controller message is unrelated, unless you really have a rocket raid controller in there. It is one of those drivers that is loaded inside the kernel and tries to attach, because if a system does have a hptrr it needs to be loaded early enough to recognize the disk setup.

Even if a system doesn't have a hard disk, the install/live cd should not hang during hardware detection. This is usually related to a faulty hints file or driver bugs. It would help if you could somehow log a verbose boot, so that one can see what does work and rule out those parts.
 
I have found the soultion online which did not involved HD controllers. It was at

http://freebsd.monkey.org/freebsd-questions/200512/msg01854.html


near the bottom which listed ways to bypass serial port and keyboard confusion:

Interrupt the kernel loading process, then:
>
> set hint.sio.0.disabled=1
> set hint.sio.1.disabled=1
> set hint.atkbd.0.flags=0x9


I then modified my device.hints files with these syscrtls.



I have another question though, and that is how do I gather the verbose messages during an install when the os is not installed, since I cannot access /var/run/dmesg.boot? This would be the most appropriate thing to do if I have another failed os installation.

Thanks.
 
Hehe, you'll love the answer. You need a serial console for that ;)

One can also use a digital camera, because it is usually the last part on screen that is the most informative.

Make sure you set those hints without the 'set' command in /boot/device.hints after installation.
 
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