*BSD News Article 57355


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From: ah@alvman.RoBIN.de (Andreas Haakh)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: 2.1R : Big install problems - Unstable system
Date: 7 Dec 1995 23:22:29 GMT
Organization: A poorly-installed InterNetNews site
Lines: 56
Message-ID: <4a7svl$3sp@alvman.RoBIN.de>
References: <1995Dec6.154738.1@ugun2a>
NNTP-Posting-Host: alvman.robin.de
Organisation: 
X-Newsreader: TIN [UNIX 1.3 950726BETA PL0]

Grüazi,

F. Marcos (marcos@uni2a.unige.ch) wrote:
: 
: As subject line says.., I'm having lots of problems installing FBSD 2.1R.
: 
: I've been running 2.0R for 1 year on a 486DX2 with 8MB RAM and a 540 Meg IDE
: disk.
: 
: When moving to 2.1R, I've added 32M RAM and a 2Gig SCSI disk with an Adaptec
: 2842-VL controller.
: 
: The partition scheme is as follows : IDE  : 456 Meg for DOS
:                                              64 Meg Swap
:                                              20 Meg root (/)
:                                      SCSI :  1100 Meg for DOS
:                                               800 Meg for /usr
: 
: Now, my FBSD box could not stay stable for more than 5 hours.
: I've tried to install 2.1 from scratch, compile kernels with lots of differents
: options, slow down the SCSI transfer rate, add wait-states, etc...

That sounds familiar ;-))

Well, I will not shut down my computer in order to tell you the exact settings
but I still remember some things...

First, I had a great stable system using a VESA 486 Green Mainboard with 
an ISA ET4000 card, an AHA 1542, an IO-card and an SMC Ethercard Elite. 
Nothing but ISA ... Then I decided to improve my system. I put the AHA1542
into my old 386 and bought the AHA 2842. That's where the trouble started.
I received ed0-devicetimeouts, kernel panics, couldn't install OS/2 etc. 
I spent a week or more to try all possible settings. Checked io-addresses 
etc. again and again, added wait-states with no success.

The solution for me was in the bios-setup. I changed lots of options.
The one that solved my problem was for the AT Bus CLock. It was configured 
'AUTO' and I assume it allways selected the highest rate. When I selected 
a fixed (lower) speed everything worked just fine. The disk-throughput was 
much better than before. 

This was all under FreeBSD 2.0.5 (I wait for the CD before I upgrade) but
it should solve Your probs as well. There are still some bugs in the SCSI-
system. The tape somtimes locks the SCSI-bus but I think these things are 
solved in 2.1R.

Maybe You also have to change the settings for external Cache, I also 
played with that parameter but the final solution was the AT Bus CLOCK.

Hope this helps.

Andreas
-- 
  Andreas Haakh                 \           ah@alvman.RoBIN.de
  Kirschberg 12 b                 \           +49 6155 62615
  64347 Griesheim                   \_________________________________________