Installer gets hung after creating newfs

M

mnlnl4

Hello. I am installing FreeBSD 8.2 on my four years old desktop. The installer gets hung after creating new fs on a hard disk.

I am guessing it is a problem with my disk controller. I have an ancient ATI xpress 200 chipset. The south bridge is ATI(AMD) SB600. I know this south bridge is particularly troublesome. I remember two or three years back, I need to disable MSI(Message signal interrupt) and port multiplier to get it work in AHCI mode in Slackware Linux.

I have disabled MSI by setting

Code: 
hint.ahci.0.msi=0 
hw.pci.enable_msi=0
hw.pci.enable_msix=0

at boot time prompt. But still no luck.

Does anybody happen to have this chipset and know a workaround? Another question is I am about to build a new AMD CPU based box, How is FreeBSD with newer AMD chipsets, say SB710/SB750/SB850?

Thanks.
 
Forget to mention, the installer DVD won't boot when ACPI is disabled (A kernel panic when choose to disable ACPI at boot time).
 
A post in the forums here from 2008 suggests you should use "disable" not enable. Have you tried disabling things in the bios? As to your new build question, search ("9150e") here in the forums for one thread with suggestions.

More answers might be more relevant if your post exactly where the installer hangs. For instance, when I upgraded v7 to v8 I had to load three ko's for disks to be recognized in some cases. (Too complex to explain, search geom_mbr.ko maybe here in the forums).
 
The installer gets hung after the file system is created before extracting base tar ball. The newer ahci cam driver doesn't work with SB600 even if I disable MSI. The older ataahci doesn't work well either. Is there a way to disable ataahci at boot time to fall back to ata_ati driver. (I mean is ataahci compiled into generic kernel?).

Thanks.
 
I have checked ata_ahci module is compiled into the kernel on the installer dvd, so can'be disabled at boot time. I used to use FreeBSD 6.2 on the same desktop before ahci was implemented in FreeBSD. The ata_ati driver worked fine.

The cause could be port multiplier. As I mentioned above, in Linux, I need disable port multiplier to get sb600 work.
 
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