*BSD News Article 71725


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Initial Installation Problem
Date: 22 Jun 1996 10:41:38 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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rubin@sequel.com (Robert J. Rubin) wrote:

> Kernel boots...swapon...fsck's filesystems...hangs.
> 
> This just ain't gonna work in this box.  I'd think it's plain vanilla:
> 486/66, 16M RAM  (AMI BIOS...btw....at what point does
> FreeBSD stop using the BIOS?)

Once the kernel is loaded.  The bootstrap toggles between real mode
(for using the BIOS -- disk reads, terminal IO) and protected mode
(for accessing all the memory > 1 MB), and finally goes back into
protected mode and jumps to the kernel entry point.  Some valuable
information as obtained from the BIOS has been dumped on the kernel
stack before (so the kernel is called with a pointer to a structure as
an argument), but once the kernel is running the (16 bit) BIOS is not
used anymore.

What makes me wonder is that your /etc/rc does check the file systems
without problems.  Can you boot the machine single-user (-s at the
boot prompt)?  Can you try to isolate which of the parts of /etc/rc
might be the offender?

In order to continue after booting single-user, run ``fsck -p''
manually, then ``mount -u -t ufs'', to get your disks read/write.  At
this point, you're able to use vi to edit the /etc/rc script.

Btw., pressing ^T while /etc/rc is running should get you a one-line
status summary.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)